Institute of Solid State Physics


SS22WS22SS23WS23SS24WS24      Guidelines for Master Students

Early life failure mechanisms detection in power MOSFETs by means of thermal burn-in
Jürgen Paust
11:15 - 12:15 Wednesday 25 January 2023 PH01150

One of the key challenges for manufacturers is the reliability of the ICs when built into the customer’s application. Therefore, the semiconductor devices integrated in these ICs, need to work exactly as supposed to. A more prominent effect in this context is the so-called bathtub curve, which describes the fact that most defects and failures in such devices are occurring at the beginning of the lifetime of the chip, rather than after several years of operation.
Therefore, the semiconductor industry is always striving to minimize such early life failure rates (ELFR) by detecting potentially defective devices already during in-house electrical testing.
One way of activating such latent defects is by aging the devices in a high temperature oven, while checking for any changes in the observed functionality (burn-in process).