2006 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium Draws Top Researchers to San Jose; Conference Explores Future of Microelectronics.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Tim Collopy, Director of IBM's Technology Group Industry, Addresses Industry Leaders

More than 650 engineers, scientists and industry professionals gathered this week at the 2006 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS). Held for the second consecutive year in Silicon Valley, the 44th annual conference runs through March 30 at the McEnery Convention Center/Hilton San Jose in San Jose, Calif.

"There were 20 technical sessions with over 100 platform presentations and 66 poster presentations," explained 2006 IRPS general chair Dr. Carole D. Graas. "This provided our colleagues from Asia to Europe the opportunity to discuss the past year's most significant discoveries in reliability engineering."

Keynote Address

This year's keynote speaker, Tim Collopy, director for IBM's Technology Group, addressed the symposium on the Adaptation of Reliability Methodologies to Market Expectations and Technology Roadmaps. Collopy discussed modifying reliability models and qualification methods that have not changed in decades to accommodate unique customer requirements (e.g. foundry) or industry standards (e.g. JEDEC). The quality processes of reliability engineering must continue to improve as new technology and customer demands continue to evolve.

Technical Paper Awards

The 2006 conference also is the venue to announce the best technical papers from the 2005 IRPS. Selected as the 2005 IRPS Best Paper Award was "Reliability Improvement and Burn In Optimization through the Use of Die Level Predictive Modeling," authored by Walter Carl Riordan, Russell Miller, Eric R. St. Pierre, Intel Corporation.

The 2005 IRPS Outstanding Paper Award was "Disorder-Controlled Kinetics Model for Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and its Experimental Verification," by Benjamin Kaczer, Vladimir I. Arkhipov, Robin Degraeve, Nadine Collaert, IMEC; Guido Groeseneken, IMEC and ESAT KU Leuven; and Michael W. Goodwin, Texas Instruments at IMEC.

The 2005 IRPS Best Poster was "Stability of Capacitance Voltage Linearity for High-K MIM Capacitor," by Carine Besset, Sylvie Bruyere, F. Monsieur, S. Boret, E. Vincent, STMicroelectronics; and E. Deloffre, ST Microelectronics and IMEP/ENSERG.

About IRPS

For more than 40 years, IRPS has been one of the leading meetings for engineers in the area of electronic component reliability. IRPS promotes the comprehension of reliability and performance of integrated circuits and microelectronic assemblies through an improved understanding of failure mechanisms in the user's environment. Originally started in the early 1960's by the military and aerospace community, IRPS is now sponsored by IEEE Reliability Society and IEEE Electron Devices Society. All accepted IRPS papers will appear in the symposium proceedings publication, as well as on the Virtual IRPS DVD-ROM, which is available now for the previous 2005 IRPS.

For further information, or to request technical paper abstracts for the 2006 IRPS, please visit the IRPS Web site at www.irps.org or contact: