DSM Reliability Concerns - Impact on Safety Assessment

For more than 40 years, Gordon Moore's experimental law has been predicting the evolution of the number of transistors in integrated circuits, thereby guiding electronics developments. Until last years, this evolution did not have any measurable impact on components' quality; but the trend is beginning to reverse. This paper is addressing the impact of scaling on the reliability of integrated circuits. It is analyzing - from both qualitative and quantitative point of view - the behavior of Deep Sub-Micron technologies in terms of robustness and reliability. It is particularly focusing on three basics of safety analyses for aeronautical systems: failure rates, lifetimes and atmospheric radiations' susceptibility.