Summary: Almost all systems of interest in reliability applications are designed to be repaired, rather than discarded, after their first failure. Nevertheless, most reliability texts overemphasize nonrepairable items (henceforth, "parts"); if repairable systems (henceforth, "systems") are addressed, they usually are assumed to be same-as-new after repair. Such renewal by repair is neither plausible, nor mathematically tractable, nor even desirable since reliability growth is sought. Moreover, even with the utmost care in distinguishing between parts and systems, failure-data-sets for parts and systems look similar, their mathematical models look similar and even fundamentally different analysis results often look similar. Most reliability texts are impeccably rigorous when addressing parts but, unfortunately, many become extremely sloppy when treating systems - which require much more rigor! All these interacting factors have caused widespread misconceptions about even basic systems' reliability concepts. For example, what could be simpler than the idea that a system's reliability is improving if it fails less often with increasing operating time? In general, there is no connection between this concept and decreasing "failure rate" since the blatant misnomer "failure rate" almost always is defined as a property of a part's distribution of time-to-failure. Moreover, even under the definition for parts, increasing "failure rate" does not imply a monotonically increasing average number of part failures per unit time. This course presents basic concepts and models for parts and systems and stresses their up to infinite differences, rather than their superficially striking but relatively unimportant similarities.

Summary: Six Sigma improves both product and process quality, eliminating defects using a suite of tools that span: statistical, analytical, and collaborative domains. The six sigma nomenclatures cross over different languages and cultures with improved understanding and exactness. Six Sigma improves our every day processes.

The Six Sigma process has been extended to take the initiative in developing better designs that avoid problems rather than having to go back and correct them. This is the Design-for-Six Sigma (DFSS) initiative. It focuses on getting correct requirements, communicating these effectively across the team, examining and managing the design and environment anomalies, and flowing down tolerances from the system level to the component levels (also known as critical parameter management). Recently, the practices within DFSS have been further extended from Hardware Reliability to Software Quality and Reliability, and for that matter, to other aspects of product development including: Portfolio and Marketing Analysis, Technology Research and Development, Product Commercialization, Supply Chain and other support functions. These processes have been shown to deliver products with as few as 3-4 defects per million opportunities, such as seen on space shuttle software or commercial aircraft flights in the US.

Summary: This tutorial discusses examples of reliability mechanisms and how these can affect the normal operation of selected VLSI circuits. Large circuit-count ASIC chips use standard digital and analog circuits such as Logic gates, eSRAM, eDRAM and I/O circuits which must function properly under various voltage and thermal environments. These chips are subjected to Reliability Screens such as Burn In to activate latent defects and screen out those chips that cannot meet product specifications for performance, power and operating margins. The advent of degraded VLSI circuit operating margins due to the activated defects as well as reliability mechanisms such as negative bias temperature instability (NBTI), hot carrier injection (HCI), and others will be discussed. How these failing circuits can then manifest themselves in observed product failures will also be discussed. After completing this course you should be able to develop an understanding of: Reliability and today's VLSI chips; Reliability and VLSI design; VLSI circuits; Circuit reliability mechanisms.

Summary: This course will begin by outlining approaching limits of conventional CMOS technology. New architectural requirements and paradigms for future nanoelectronics will be described. .Top-down. and .bottom-up. manufacturing paradigms, particularly self-assembly of organic monolayers will be discussed. Theoretical and experimental realizations of molecular-scale electronic switches will be described. This course will also show nanoscale memory and logic circuits built with these materials and methods and will discuss potential nanoscale chemical and biological sensors built with these materials and methods.

Summary: This is a two-part course. Part 2 titled, "Molecular Electronics-II: Molecular Electronic Device Fabrication and Characterization" will: Discuss the advantages of molecular electronic devices and present experimental proof of concepts; Describe the formation of molecular junctions, the central component of molecular electronic devices; Describe the design and fabrication approaches for some of the most successful molecular electronic device prototypes; Present electrical characterization approaches and challenges; Discuss non-device based electrical screening approaches; Present the current status and outlook for molecular electronic devices.

Summary: Failure Mode Effects Analyses (FMEA) have proven to be an effective method for improving the reliability of hardware systems but many still consider software FMEAs to be problematic. This course provides a proven methodology and a detailed example for planning and performing FMEAs on software. An introduction to Software FMEA and relation to Hardware FMEA will be provided along with a step-by-step approach to performing software FMEA--using excerpts from a real example.

Summary: Redundant or fault tolerant computer-based systems provide several challenges to reliability analysis and probabilistic risk assessment. Computer systems which are designed to achieve high reliability frequently employ high levels of redundancy, dynamic redundancy management and complex fault and error recovery techniques. It is precisely this flexibility and adaptability inherent in fault tolerant computer systems that makes analysis problematic. In this tutorial, Dynamic Fault Tree (DFT) modeling techniques for handling these difficulties are described. In this tutorial we introduce the DFT approach and apply the special gates to the analysis of several example systems. Subsequent sections discuss fault coverage and its impact on reliability analysis. After completing this course you should be able to develop an understanding of: The DFT approach with an emphasis on applying the special gates to the analysis of several example systems; Fault coverage and its impact on reliability analysis.