Predicting Failure in Modern Microelectronic Devices Caused by Joule Heating - RMGS

The current trend in the microelectronic industry is to develop 3D IC, in which the materials integration and circuit layout are dense. Heat management becomes the most critical reliability issue. The so-called “low power” device actually means low entropy production device. In the irreversible process of electrons flow in and out of the device, while the number of charges in and out of the device is conserved, the entropy production or Joule heating is not, which will lead to failure such as electro-migration, thermosmigration, and stress-migration. From the point of view of reliability, to overcome those failure problems, it is most important to obtain mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) of a specific device, so that its lifetime is known. Then, those early failures cause by Joule heating can be prevented. In this proposal, we plan to obtain a test vehicle from Huawei to conduct MTTF study and to find out its failure mode due to electro-migration, thermosmigration, and stress-migration. In essence, we shall develop the foundation of reliability for consumer electronic products in Huawei.