IC Reliabilty for a reliable future

Reliability is a growing concern for IC designers, especially in products such as communications, medical, and transportation, where reliability and performance are not just market differentiators, but critical aspects of safe and effective operation.

The products that we have today might not be functioning the same after 2, 5 or 10 years. If you have a processor today that is operating at a certain frequency, you might be expecting the frequency is going to drop after 5 years or more, due to the applied stress on every device in the circuit. This stress in terms of bias or temperature is going to degrade the overall performance of that specific device, which is an element in the bigger design. And accordingly, the function of the design might not be performing what it was intended to do, or it will be degraded from what it was intended to perform.

Designers now must account for reliability in their circuit design and verification, effectively shifting concerns about defectivity, yield and manufacturability all the way to the left and to the right in the design-through-manufacturing flow.