Preface

On behalf of the 2012 Management Committee of the International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) and the IRPS Board of Directors, it is my pleasure to present the 50th edition of the International Reliability Physics technical proceedings. When the founding General Chairs, Morton Goldberg and Joseph Vaccaro, organized this conference back in 1962, they probably never expected that their legacy would be carried to future generations well past the start of the 21^st century, but here we are. As Joseph J. Naresky, Technical Director of the Engineering Directorate at the Rome Air Development Center, wrote in the forward of the first edition of the Physics of Failure in Electronics, “The objectives of the symposium were stated as follows: ‘We believe that this is an appropriate time to bring together research workers who are concerned with the determination and enhancement of electronic part and device reliability so as to evaluate recent progress, to consider future directions of research, to examine critically the practicality of this approach, and to explore means for implementing the philosophy which has been advanced.’” To this day, IRPS has remained true to this objective even as the industry has undergone tectonic shifts as microelectronics has evolved through the decades.