On the Reliability of Post-CMOS and SET Systems

The advent of ubiquitous electronic appliances in the modern information society has founded its success on the premise of using highly reliable components in every development level. Based on the mature CMOS fabrication process, larger and faster, but also power-hungry and very complex integrated circuits have been fabricated on the assumption of very reliable operation of their constituting modules, from the atomic elements such as transistors, and passive components such as capacitances, routing lines, etc., to complex modules made of several thousand of transistors, such as arithmetic and logic unit modules, memory blocks. Also, the availability of reliable electronic design automation (EDA) tools and efficient design-flows has been assumed. The vast majority of microelectronic developments presented nowadays uses the well-established CMOS process and fabrication technology which exhibit high reliability rates. The hypothesis of reliable components has mostly been adopted in the development of electronic systems fabricated in the past four decades. Several indicators show that future fabrication processes will exhibit increased failure rates and degraded fabrication yield. This Chapter focuses on the construction of ABSTRACT