Reliability assessment of fielded plastic and hermetically packaged microelectronics

This paper presents the results from multiple studies at Honeywell, of piece-part failure rates experienced in field use. These studies consider 7 line-replaceable-units (LRU), containing either hermetically sealed microcircuits (HSM) or plastic encapsulated microcircuits (PEM) or both. This paper compares the resulting field failure rates (λ) of HSM and PEM: digital devices: λ_PEM≈0.5λ_HSM; linear devices: λ_PEM≈3λ_HSM; only a small fraction of the linear devices degraded in performance at 125°C, though their performance at room temperature was within specification. The latter two points suggest that linear devices might require more attention relative to characterization over temperature and application considerations than do digital devices