A model for moisture induced corrosion failures in microelectronic packages

As integrated circuit geometries become smaller and package sizes and I/O counts increase, there is an increased potential of failures resulting from moisture ingress and corrosion. To aid in reliability prediction, design for reliability, and assessing reliability tradeoffs, a methodology for coupling the mechanisms of moisture ingress and corrosion in microelectronic packages into a first-order failure-rate model is presented. The model focuses on aluminum metallization corrosion resulting from chlorine-based contaminants, but is general enough to be applied to other cases.>