CMOS Electronics: How it Works, How it Fails

CMOS manufacturing environments are surrounded with symptoms that can indicate serious test, design, or reliability problems, which, in turn, can affect the financial as well as the engineering bottom line. This book educates readers, including non-engineers involved in CMOS manufacture, to identify and remedy these causes. This book instills the electronic knowledge that affects not just design but other important areas of manufacturing such as test, reliability, failure analysis, yield-quality issues, and problems. Designed specifically for the many non-electronic engineers employed in the semiconductor industry who need to reliably manufacture chips at a high rate in large quantities, this is a practical guide to how CMOS electronics work, how failures occur, and how to diagnose and avoid them. Key features include: builds a grasp of the basic electronics of CMOS integrated circuits and then leads the reader further to understand the mechanisms of failure; unique descriptions of circuit failure mechanisms, some found previously only in research papers and others new to this publication; targeted to the CMOS industry (or students headed there) and not a generic introduction to the broader field of electronics; and examples, exercises, and problems are provided to support the self-instruction of the reader.