On July 1st, Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company consolidated to form Semiconductor & Storage Products Company.This page describes reliability information of semiconductor products.

Purpose

[As of April, 2011]

With the ever-increasing requirements for part and device reliability, the need to evaluate product lifetime and failure rates quickly is now greater than ever. Reliability tests are conducted under test conditions that simulate potential stresses applied to semiconductor components. Depending on the situation, however, it may take an exceedingly long time until failure occurs or failure may not occur within the limited test time.
Therefore, stresses beyond those of actual operating conditions are applied to devices to physically and/or chronologically accelerate causes of degradation. In this way, device lifetime and failure rates can be determined, and failure mechanisms can be analyzed. This type of test is referred to as an accelerated lifetime test. Such tests are used to shorten the evaluation period and analyze mechanisms in detail.
The accelerated lifetime test is also sometimes used as a forced degradation test to forcibly accelerate a constant stress. It is also sometimes used as a limit test for accelerating stress to determine a limit value.
It is necessary to be noted that failure mechanisms in accelerated tests differ somewhat from those that occur under actual usage conditions. In general, if the degradation mechanism is simple, acceleration is also simple and lifetime and failure rates can be estimated relatively accurately. Complicated failure mechanisms, however, are difficult to simulate, even when best efforts are made to accelerate stresses simultaneously. This is because the different stress effects are interrelated. Therefore, analysis of acceleration data as well as estimation of lifetime and failure rates can be difficult. When performing accelerated lifetime tests, it is important to select test conditions that result in as few failure mechanism changes as possible and that minimize the number of failure mechanisms, making testing easy and simple.