Summary and Conclusions

Abstract

The microelectronics community has been aware of reliability issues in very deep-submicron and future nanoelectronic technologies for more than a decade and has responded in two major ways. On the one hand, reliability-hardened fabrication technologies have emerged, involving new materials in the fabrication process and new fabrication techniques. Industry has been able to manufacture and commercialize systems of growing complexity following Moore’s law. In a parallel track, research mostly carried out in academic institutions has focused on novel methodologies enforcing the principle of fabricating robust systems by construction, tackling the reliability issue at higher level of the semiconductor fabrication flow abstraction hierarchy. While the latter approach currently provides a minor contribution to industrial developments, it can be expected to see its importance grow as the scaling process is observed to exhaust material and technology-based solutions.