Degradation is apparent in all things and is fundamental to both manufactured and natural objects. It is often described by the second law of thermodynamics, where entropy, a measure of disorder, tends to increase with time in a closed system. Things age! This concise reference work brings together experts and key players engaged in the physics of degradation to present the background science, current thinking and developments in understanding, and gives a detailed account of emerging issues across a selection of engineering applications. The work has been put together to equip the upper level undergraduate student, postgraduate student, as well as the professional engineer and scientist, in the importance of physics of degradation. The aim of The Physics of Degradation in Engineered Materials and Devices is to bridge the gap between published textbooks on the fundamental science of degradation phenomena and published research on the engineering science of actual fabricated materials and devices. A history of the observation and understanding of physics of degradation is presented and the fundamentals and principles of thermodynamics and entropy are extensively discussed. This is the focus of this book, with an extended chapter by Alec Feinberg on equilibrium thermodynamic damage and non-equilibrium thermodynamic damage. It concludes with two particular technologies to give examples of areas of application.

"Reliability Physics and Engineering" provides critically important information for designing and building reliable cost-effective products. The textbook contains numerous example problems with solutions. Included at the end of each chapter are exercise problems and answers. "Reliability Physics and Engineering" is a useful resource for students, engineers, and materials scientists.

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

The book is in five parts: Part I introduces the physical and chemical structure of polymers and their breakdown; Part II reviews electrical degradation in polymers, and Part III reviews conduction and deterministic breakdown in solids. Part IV discusses the stochastic nature of break-down from empirical and modelling viewpoints, and Part V indicates practical implications and strategies for engineers. Much of the discussion applies to non-crystalline materials generally.

Thermodynamic degradation science is a new and exciting discipline. This book merges the science of physics of failure with thermodynamics and shows how degradation modeling is improved and enhanced when using thermodynamic principles. The author also goes beyond the traditional physics of failure methods and highlights the importance of having new tools such as “Mesoscopic” noise degradation measurements for prognostics of complex systems, and a conjugate work approach to solving physics of failure problems with accelerated testing applications. Key features: • Demonstrates how the thermodynamics energy approach uncovers key degradation models and their application to accelerated testing. • Demonstrates how thermodynamic degradation models accounts for cumulative stress environments, effect statistical reliability distributions, and are key for reliability test planning. • Provides coverage of the four types of Physics of Failure processes describing aging: Thermal Activation Processes, Forced Aging, Diffusion, and complex combinations of these. • Coverage of numerous key topics including: aging laws; Cumulative Accelerated Stress Test (CAST) Plans; cumulative entropy fatigue damage; reliability statistics and environmental degradation and pollution. Thermodynamic Degradation Science: Physics of Failure, Accelerated Testing, Fatigue and Reliability Applications is essential reading for reliability, cumulative fatigue, and physics of failure engineers as well as students on courses which include thermodynamic engineering and/or physics of failure coverage.

This third edition textbook provides the basics of reliability physics and engineering that are needed by electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, biomedical engineers, materials scientists, and applied physicists to help them to build better devices/products. The information contained within should help all fields of engineering to develop better methodologies for: more reliable product designs, more reliable materials selections, and more reliable manufacturing processes— all of which should help to improve product reliability. A mathematics level through differential equations is needed. Also, a familiarity with the use of excel spreadsheets is assumed. Any needed statistical training and tools are contained within the text. While device failure is a statistical process (thus making statistics important), the emphasis of this book is clearly on the physics of failure and developing the reliability engineering tools required for product improvements during device-design and device-fabrication phases.

This book provides readers with a variety of tools to address the challenges posed by hot carrier degradation, one of today’s most complicated reliability issues in semiconductor devices. Coverage includes an explanation of carrier transport within devices and book-keeping of how they acquire energy (“become hot”), interaction of an ensemble of colder and hotter carriers with defect precursors, which eventually leads to the creation of a defect, and a description of how these defects interact with the device, degrading its performance.