Purple plague: Eliminated or just forgotten?

摘要

AbstractThe reappearance of ‘purple plague’ as a reliability and failure risk in current IC devices has led to renewed interest in the precise failure mechanisms and eventual failure mode. These are outlined and illustrated with examples of recent failures in plastic encapsulated integrated circuits, hermetically sealed integrated circuits and hybrids. The reasons for the reappearance of this type of failure are discussed, and it is shown that the problem may be expected to increase in future generation devi