Modeling and Analyzing Yield, Burn-In and Reliability for Semiconductor Manufacturing: Overview

The demand for proactive techniques to model yield and reliability and to deal with various infant mortality issues are growing with increased integrated circuit (IC) complexity and new technologies toward the nanoscale. This chapter provides an overview of modeling and analysis of yield and reliability with an additional burn-in step as a fundamental means for yield and reliability enhancement. After the introduction, the second section reviews yield modeling. The notions of various yield components are introduced. The existing models, such as the Poisson model, compound Poisson models and other approaches for yield modeling, are introduced. In addition to the critical area and defect size distributions on the wafers, key factors for accurate yield modeling are also examined. This section addresses the issues in improving semiconductor yield including how clustering may affect yield. The third section reviews reliability aspects of semiconductors such as the properties of failure mechanisms and the typical bathtub failure rate curve with an emphasis on the high rate of early failures. The issues for reliability improvement are addressed. The fourth section discusses several issues related to burn-in. The necessity for and effects of burn-in are examined. Strategies for the level and type of burn-in are examined. The literature on optimal burn-in policy is reviewed. Often percentile residual life can be a good measure of performance in addition to the failure rate or reliability commonly used. The fifth section introduces proactive methods of estimating semiconductor reliability from yield information using yield–reliability relation models. Time-dependent and -independent models are discussed. The last section concludes this chapter and addresses topics for future research and development.