Test and Health Monitoring of Microelectronics using RFID

Abstract

Interest has been growing in monitoring the ongoing health of systems and products in order to predict failures, provide warning to avoid catastrophic failures, reduce life-cycle costs and enhance their operational efficiency. This paper reviews the current state-of-the-art techniques and innovations of health monitoring of microelectronics using contactless testing. The paper explains the conventional methods of health monitoring (e.g. MTBF method), some 'state-of-research' approaches (e.g. BIT, LCM, UAP, etc) and their advantages and disadvantages as well as some newer methods developed recently (e.g. physics-of-failure based method). The latest technique of health monitoring using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is addressed. RFID chips can be used to test the failures in Integrated Circuits (ICs) during the packaging process. This test technique is contactless and cost effective and can be used to test the die after every process in the production line of IC manufacturing. It provides advantages like higher reliability, added functionality and increased throughput. RFID chips that are being used during production cycle for testing can also be used for health monitoring in real time applications ('in-situ' sensors).