A team of internationally renowned experts contribute articles which emphasize the reliability and quality issues inherent in all phases of systems design. Coverage includes fundamental failure modes of each of the device building blocks, packaged MMIC modules, current practical aspects of reliability testing and much more.

Today's marketplace demands product reliability. At the same time, it places ever-increasing demands on products that push the limits of their performance and their functional life, and it does so with the expectation of lower per-unit product costs. To meet these demands, product design now requires a focused, streamlined, concurrent engineering process that will produce a product at the lowest possible cost in the least amount of time. Design for Reliability provides a systematic approach to the design process that is sharply focused on reliability and firmly based on the physics of failure. It imparts an understanding of how, why, and when to use the wide variety of reliability engineering tools available and offers fundamental insight into the total design cycle. Applicable from the idea phase of the product development cycle through product obsolescence, Design for Reliability (DfR) concepts integrated with reliability verification and analytical physics form a coherent stage gate/phase design process that helps ensure that a product will meet customers' reliability objectives. Whether you are a high-volume manufacturer of consumer items or a low volume producer of military commodities, your goal is the same: to bring a product to market using a process focused on designing out or mitigating potential failure modes prior to production release. Readers of Design for Reliability will learn to meet that goal and move beyond solidifying a basic offering to the marketplace to creating a true competitive advantage.

Text/reference spaning the theoretical concepts of reliability models and failure distributions, to GaAs microcircuit processing and test. Provides background on the development of quality assurance and verification procedures. Some of the new changes under development to cope with pressures brought

VLSI Electronics Microstructure Science, Volume 11: GaAs Microelectronics presents the important aspects of GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) IC technology development ranging from materials preparation and IC fabrication to wafer evaluation and chip packaging. The volume is comprised of eleven chapters. Chapter 1 traces the historical development of GaAs technology for high-speed and high-frequency applications. This chapter summarizes the important properties of GaAs that serve to make this material and its related compounds technologically important. Chapter 2 covers GaAs substrate growth, ion implantation and annealing, and materials characterization, technologies that are essential for IC development. Chapters 3-6 describe the various IC technologies that are currently under development. These include microwave and digital MESFET ICs, the most mature technologies, and bipolar and field-effect heterostructure transistor ICs. The high-speed capability of GaAs ICs introduces new problems, on-wafer testing and packaging. These topics are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Applications for GaAs ICs are covered in Chapters 9 and 10. The first of these chapters is concerned with high speed computer applications; the second addresses military applications. The book concludes with a chapter on radiation effects in GaAs ICs. Scientists, engineers, researchers, device designers, and systems architects will find the book useful.

Reliability and Failure of Electronic Materials and Devices is a well-established and well-regarded reference work offering unique, single-source coverage of most major topics related to the performance and failure of materials used in electronic devices and electronics packaging. With a focus on statistically predicting failure and product yields, this book can help the design engineer, manufacturing engineer, and quality control engineer all better understand the common mechanisms that lead to electronics materials failures, including dielectric breakdown, hot-electron effects, and radiation damage. This new edition adds cutting-edge knowledge gained both in research labs and on the manufacturing floor, with new sections on plastics and other new packaging materials, new testing procedures, and new coverage of MEMS devices. Covers all major types of electronics materials degradation and their causes, including dielectric breakdown, hot-electron effects, electrostatic discharge, corrosion, and failure of contacts and solder joints New updated sections on "failure physics," on mass transport-induced failure in copper and low-k dielectrics, and on reliability of lead-free/reduced-lead solder connections New chapter on testing procedures, sample handling and sample selection, and experimental design Coverage of new packaging materials, including plastics and composites