A State-of-the-Art Review on IC EMC Reliability

Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) of integrated circuits (IC) should be within the desirable level for maintaining the functional safety and reliability of electronic systems in different complex automotive and aeronautical applications. Throughout the operational lifetime of ICs, harsh environmental conditions including extreme high or low temperature, humidity, shock, and stress tend to cause intrinsic physical degradations, which results in significant variations of long-life EMC performance of IC device. Consequently, ensuring along with maintaining electromagnetic robustness (EMR) and integrating IC reliability throughout their whole lifetime period is a key challenge that needs to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art study on developing accurate immunity and emission models of ICs focusing on quantitative evaluation of experimental characterization based on various IC EMC measurement methods under various ageing accelerated life tests. Producing accurate transient EMC models help not only estimate EMC immunity and emission levels of ICs but also allows determining different failure types and mechanisms due to radio frequency disturbance when applied to IC model structures. This paper presents a few recent researches on the conducted pulse immunity as well as emission models for ICs based on the IEC standard models, showcasing the electric fast transient (EFT) simulations and measurements applied on different IC pins considering the ageing impact. Previous studies demonstrated the importance of the ageing on the EMC performance of ICs depending on the ageing stress parameters. Future perspective of the current study would involve proposing and implementing predictive reliability model for the IC during its entire lifetime under accelerated life tests.