Database structure and discovery tools for integrated circuit reliability evaluation

The reliability performance of integrated circuits is described by means of a large amount of quantitative and qualitative data that require computer tools for effective management. The author describes some design solutions in the implementation of these tools, in particular stressing the integration of different points of view to model reliability performance; the structure of the failure database that, following expert reasoning features, implicitly contains as cause-effect relationships the results of the failure analysis; and the procedures designed to discover regularities and relationships among stored data, thus helping engineers in reliability evaluation and failure analysis