It is widely acknowledged that shrinking feature sizes in semiconductor manufacturing technologies will generate serious reliability issues for electronic products. The 2012 ITRS roadmap lists aging in semiconductor devices as one of the few most difficult challenges concerning reliability. Being almost unnoticed by today’s user, aging will eventually manifest itself clearly by the end of the current decade. Another hard issue is product-level malfunctions that are difficult, or impossible, to reproduce referred to as No Failure Found (NFF), which is caused by a combination of test escapes, aging, and environmental impact. It has been estimated that an average family spends annually over 50 Euros on NFF-related costs hidden in the price of consumer products, automotive and transportation electronics, medical equipment.
Mission
The BASTION consortium partners will unite their forces to contend the aging and No-Failure-Found (NFF) issues. The project will investigate currently unknown defects, uncertain fault coverage and unclassified field returns. A new defect universe will be assembled and faults will be classified into comprehensive classes. BASTION will study the mechanisms of aging and improve the longevity of electronic products. Embedded instrumentation and the IEEE P1687 standard will be applied to develop a scalable and fast error detection and localization infrastructure.