Integrated circuit failure analysis and reliability prediction based on physics of failure

Abstract

It is difficult to obtain the failure data of actual prototype to support reliability analysis because the development stage has been shortened drastically and the traditional reliability tests are gradually unaffordable under the market pressure. In this paper, a reliability simulation based on physics of failure is proposed to test the reliability of a CPU circuit board, in which the digital model of the circuit board, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are used synthetically to perform the analysis. The failure points of the circuit board are analyzed and the failure distribution is obtained by fitting the simulation data, so the life can be predicted by Monte Carlo simulation. Moreover, some improvement measures and suggestions can be supplied based on the failure mechanism of the circuit board to improve its inherent reliability. Comparing with the traditional methods, the method of reliability simulation prediction based on physics of failure has the advantages of fast, accurate, economical, efficient and can identify more detailed failure information.