The final report of the 2008 International Integrated Reliability Workshop represents
the final product of the many authors and volunteers who made this year’s
meeting a great success. Since it began in 1982 as the Wafer Level Reliability
Workshop, the meeting has maintained a character very different from most other
scientific and technical meetings. Attendees are encouraged and expected to participate
actively in every aspect of the Workshop, to share their own results and insights,
to question speakers, to take part in the discussion groups and special interest
groups. Since it began, the Workshop has maintained an atmosphere which
fosters close interaction among attendees in a setting of great natural beauty with
minimal distractions.
We were very fortunate this year to have Dakshi Dakshinamoorthy, vice president
of Freescale Semiconductor for reliability and quality assurance, as our keynote
speaker. His excellent presentation, “Quality and Reliability Challenges for Growing
Markets,” helped set the tone for a very productive meeting.
We began a new meeting format this year, starting on Sunday evening with a special
tutorial by prof. Subhash Mitra of Stanford University. Prof. Mitra spoke about
circuit failure prediction for robust system design in scaled CMOS. In the new format
we were able to devote a full day to a single track of five more outstanding tutorials,
presented by world class experts.
Our contributed technical program of twenty five oral presentations, nine refereed
poster presentations, and several walk in posters, dealt broadly with some of the
most important topics in reliability today: NBTI, high-k MOS problems, reliability in
compound semiconductor devices, fWLR, back- end reliability issues, reliability in
sensors, and memories.
As is always the case, the evenings were fully occupied by after dinner discussion
groups and poster sessions. Wednesday evening was enlivened by Dr. Yuan Chen of
Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Yuan presented a very entertaining talk about
space exploration and mission assurance.
This year’s workshop could not have taken place without the hard work of many
volunteers on the technical program committee and the management committee. It
was great to work with all of you!
Next year’s workshop will be held from October 18 to 22, 2009. Additional details
about next year’s meeting can be found in the call for papers. Hope to see you at next year’s workshop.
Patrick M. Lenahan
General Chair , IIRW 2008
