Description

Complex silicon devices are increasingly controlling critical systems where safety and reliability are key concerns. Silicon technology is subject to numerous failure modes which can be broadly classified into soft- error effects (due to natural radiation) and life-time effects (e.g. electro-migration, NBTI, HCI). It is necessary to consider all of these failure modes and how they propagate through the system and produce user-visible effects. There are no consistent tools or methodologies to address this problem. Current ad-hoc approaches are not able to cope with the diversity of technology failure modes, increased design sizes and the complex industrial relationships between consumers and suppliers of electronic components. RIIF (Reliability Information Interchange Format), is an initiative to develop a standard modeling approach for specifying the failure mechanisms in silicon devices and systems built using these devices. One of the main goals of the workshop is to establish the requirements for RIIF and assess the current implementation.