The final report of the 2011 Integrated International Reliability Workshop is the summary of the contributions of all authors, invited reliability experts and volunteers that helped to make this workshop a success.

The 2011 workshop was a special workshop to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of IIRW!

We were lucky that O.D. “Bud” Trapp, who initiated the workshop back in 1982, joined this special anniversary. He started the IIRW 2011 program with an evening talk on Sunday, explaining how the workshop started, who were the key contributors in the early years and what difficulties the organizers had to face – like nowadays sometimes it was just too much snow. It was amazing to listen and compare earlier workshops with its present day form. Some things have changed, but the special appearance of the workshop with its natural encouragement for discussions is and was the key for IIRW.

This year the keynote talk was given by Tanya Nigam, a principal reliability expert of GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Her talk entitled “To seek out new challenges and solutions, to boldly go where few have gone before” was very well received  as she outlined the challenges associated with many actual and upcoming reliability topics that Foundries and the whole semiconductor industry are facing.

Like in the recent years the Tutorial program was mixed throughout the Technical Program. The topics covered this year were reliability of TFT’s, charge pumping fundamentals, reliability assurance, GaN reliability, non-volatile memory reliability, and soft error rate, all presented by well established experts.

IIRW also hosted several invited talks addressing BTI effects, 22nm variability, recent trends in CMOS reliability and JEDEC. Where possible the invited talks opened the appropriate oral sessions. The technical program involved nine different sessions this year, including BTI, devices, circuits, III-V devices, memory, BEOL, hot carriers, fWLR/TDDB, and finally late news. The new offering of an author’s corner after the oral sessions was well received and probably needs to be given more time if the overall workshop structure allows.

The evenings were spent in a rather relaxed atmosphere with poster sessions, discussion groups and special interest groups. GaN reliability definitely was a strong contributor to the workshop this year and it is no surprise that a special interest group was formed on this subject as well. The hot topics for discussion groups this year were BTI (as still several properties are still not well understood) and reliability simulation (reliability engineers need more design for reliability early in their technology development). The next IIRW committee plans to invite an expert to continue the reliability simulation discussion.

This final report includes all papers that were presented, the abstracts of the keynote talk, the tutorials and the summaries of the discussion groups. Take your time to review and enjoy the collection of contributions that paved the success for IIRW 2011.

The next workshop will occur from October 14 to 18, 2012 at the well known location of Stanford Sierra Camp. For details please refer to the 2012 Call for Papers included on this web site.

                                                                                                             Rolf Geilenkeuser

                                                                                                        General Chair, IIRW 2011