Challenges and potential of new approaches for reliability assessment of nanotechnologies

Reliability assessment of components, integrated circuits or micro-assemblied devices, is undoubtedly identified as one of the major factors conditioning the on-going development of microelectronics. In the same way, growing market penetration by nanotechnologies is clearly related to the imperative demonstration of satisfactory built-in operational reliability with respect to actual severe standards. This situation requires a specific effort on built-in reliability. These considerations must be integrated, as early as possible at the beginning of the development 'top-down' and the 'bottom-up' approaches. Reliability issues cover extremely large scientific fields such as physics, material science, electrical transport, thermal phenomena, coupling interfaces between optics and electronics, statistical models, etc. The objective of this paper deals with the presentation of new, original methodologies for reliability assessment, coming from studies in the IMS Laboratory, in close collaboration with industrial and academic partners. These new approaches are based on the combination of the physical laws of failure, behavioral simulations and statistical methods, adding inevitable parametric dispersions to extrapolate failure rates and lifetime in operating conditions. Some results are presented and analyzed on micro-assemblied technologies and photonic components for high-rate optical links. The main goal is to discuss their potentiality and applicability field with a view to intrinsic nanodevices reliability assessment in operating conditions.