Research - Introduction

Reliability as a scientific discipline is concerned with the analysis, assessment and prediction of the lifetime of microelectronic systems (e. g. integrated circuit packageing, MEMS, etc.).

The main challenges involved therein are the handling of the complexity of microsystems (system-reliability), the correlation of degradation to the nanostructure of the materials (nano-reliability) and the generation of lifetime models for the transferability between field and lab testing conditions (definition of accelerated and combined tests).

Reliability prediction crucially hinges upon the correct and accurate description of the respective failure mechanisms. The research therefore comprises the development of lifetime models for microsystems starting from the material level up to the system level, based on the physical understanding of the materials involved in terms of their properties and failure mechanisms as function of their structure and external loading conditions ("physics of failure").