Chapter 2 – Electronic Devices: How They Operate and Are Fabricated

Books on reliability ideally focus on issues related to component and device failure within the context of how they are intended to function. Because it is often not necessary to know about the latter to address the former, these two bodies of knowledge and expertise often remain separate concerns. This is especially so because most failures involve materials other than the semiconductors, e.g., metallizations, insulation, and packaging materials. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that malfunction, failure, and reliability can be more intelligently confronted through some knowledge of device behavior and fabrication methods employed. For example, awareness of device current–voltage characteristics is certainly helpful in diagnosing failure modes in some instances. Similarly, an appreciation of the processing steps involved in device manufacture may suggest ways to avoid future failures. In this spirit, the chapter is primarily devoted to elevating the consciousness and sensitivity of readers to electronic devices and their uses, characteristics, and instabilities. Many aspects of the degradation and reliability of specific devices will be introduced here in a qualitative way. We shall return to these same issues in later chapters, where degradation and the physics of failure will be analytically modeled at a deeper level.