From smartphones to laptops, we use a variety of devices every day that rely on integrated circuits (ICs), or chips, to function. These chips are made up of thousands of transistors and interconnects, ...

The Living Computers museum in Seattle has a Xerox Alto, the machine famous for being the first to sport a mouse-based windowing graphical user interface. They received it in working condition and put ...

Reliability is as much a key to success in the microelectronicsindustry as is performance. Not only must a product perform asdesired, it must also work for an extended period of time withoutfail, ...

An innovative measurement technique is providing new insights on electromigration, a leading cause of premature death of microcircuits. Until recently, this phenomenon, which causes fatal shorts and ...

The shift towards the 28nm node and beyond has put the spotlight back on the interconnect in semiconductor manufacturing. In chip scaling, the big problem in the interconnect is resistance-capacitance ...

Are your environmental test results exposing true device weaknesses, or just reflecting extreme stress conditions?

Electromigration (EM) is a phenomenon that has been well researched and understood by the design community. At mature nodes, its impact on digital integrated circuits, particularly signal ...

ALL but a few 1 of the numerous reports in the past few years on the application of electromigration or electrophoresis on paper have used a comparatively low voltage. Recently, however, a method of ...