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New Solutions for New Challenges: A recent article in the Financial Times on the growth of cellular phone usage in Japan featured a photograph of hundreds of Japanese teenagers flashing their cellular phones to capture an image of their prime minister delivering an impassioned speech. For these young fans, the latest in digital technology offered the chance to hoard their own slice of history, instantly. Take a look around you, and it quickly becomes evident that digital consumer electronics have become an integral part of our everyday lives. From digital cameras and cellular phones to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and high-definition televisions (HDTVs), digital consumer products are making the world more wireless and connected. New applications for digital consumer electronics arise nearly every day to address new needs. Whoever would have thought the need or desire to use their cellular phone as a camera to take, transmit and receive pictures, like the Japanese teenagers mentioned above? Yet, markets for such applications are emerging, and with digital consumer electronics becoming increasingly indispensable, you need not stretch your imagination too far to see a future where color displays are embedded in appliances and furniture; where freeways are controlled by vast electronic networks to ensure smooth traffic flow and minimize accidents; where future generations of cars will probably have drive-bywire systems not unlike Boeing 777s; and, where an
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Spring 2004
Yield Management Solutions
entire forensic laboratory can be built onto a microchip. In the more immediate future, Intel envisions a seamless, wireless home network that can handle music, photos, and video content available anytime, anywhere and on any device in the home. In this increasingly digitized world, having an electronic device that is anything less than 100 percent reliable is not an option. The financial and personal loss caused by the widespread occurrence of devices that are unreliable or fail altogether in the field would be truly grim. However, while the reality of a fully connected world is still years away, the prospects of poor device reliability and product failure in the field are here today. As the semiconductor industry ramps to 90-nm production and engages in process development at the 65-nm node, reliability-related problems such as micro voids, electro-migration, stress migration, de-lamination and cracking, can no longer be contained in development, and are arising at random during production. The introduction of dozens of new and exotic materials at these design rules to augment device performance and speed, such as silicon-on-insulator (SOI), strained silicon, atomic layer deposition (ALD) barriers and new metal compounds, present their own unique process integration issues that ultimately can further impair reliability. And while these issues will not cause flying commuter vehicles to crash into the Earth today, they present very real obstacles to realizing the dream of a truly interconnected world.