Can burn-in screen wearout mechanisms?: reliability modeling of defective subpopulations-a case study

The author presents a specific industrial reliability study involving mobile ionic contamination of integrated circuits. Experiments were conducted to investigate the reliability implications for field usage. The existence of defective subpopulations is verified. The author determines the failure distribution for the failure mechanism. He calculates an activation energy and develops a model for expected field behavior. The models are checked for goodness of fit. The author generates curves that allow any product user to predict field behavior based on historical performance. This investigation illustrates several important principles of designing and analyzing an experiment to determine whether defective subpopulations exist. Issues concerning spontaneous recovery of failures and the results of different bake (time and temperature) conditions on heating failures are addressed.<>