Estimating effective dielectric thickness for capacitors with extrinsic defects by a statistical method

Simulated capacitor breakdown voltage data are fit to a mixture of two Weibull distributions using the method of maximum likelihood. The dielectric thickness of extrinsic capacitors is estimated as a part of a mixture distribution, allowing simultaneous prediction of failure times using both intrinsic and extrinsic failures. Confidence intervals on the reliability parameters and the 10 year FIT rate at 5 V are successfully estimated using the delta method. The same approach is applied to a real data set with similar results.