Separating HBT wearout from defects during early life operation

• Discussion of relationships between defects, quality, and reliability.
• New type of bathtub curve measuring “fallout” applies for both quality and reliability.
• Used yield fallout and leakage outliers to analyze and identify root causes for early fails.
• Demonstrated electrical screen to detect and remove defects.
• Electrically screened samples pass humidity qualification stress testing.

This is a paper that bridges the gap between quality and reliability. It is focused specifically on early life failures – the ones that customers actually experience. Progress on identifying, duplicating, and predicting early failures is necessary to remove defects and improve reliability for semiconductor products. This work relies on the notion that quality is an integral part of device reliability and the results shown here reinforce the existence of quality-to-reliability correlations for certain failure mechanisms. This work advances the knowledge of reliability by showing the importance of the relationship between quality and reliability to draw the focus back to what really matters for customers... reduced defects and lower early fallout.