Effects of the Coupling Between Components of the Reliability of an Integrated Function

It is often stated, following a more or less well-founded process of reasoning, that the reliability of the medium-scale integrated/large-scale integrated (MSI/LSI) circuits exceeds that of the equivalent functions achieved using other technologies. The evidence generally advanced to justify this belief is the reduction in the number of interconnections. Nevertheless, is there not a danger that, above a certain complexity, a part of the gain in reliability may be lost since in these structures the elementary components depend on each other? The work set out here attempts to answer this question by modeling the failures in a structure, the elementary components of which are from one population but whose failures are not independent.