Conducting HAST (Highly Accelerated Stress Test) testing during chip development is a crucial step in ensuring the long-term reliability of chips in harsh environments.
HAST, also known as Highly Accelerated Stress Test, is an extreme condition that significantly accelerates the physical and chemical degradation of materials inside chips (such as metal migration, insulation layer hydrolysis, interface degradation, etc.) through high temperature (usually above 130 ° C), high humidity (above 85% RH), and high bias voltage (optional). For example, failure modes that take several years to manifest at room temperature may only take a few hundred hours to reproduce in HAST. The testing objectives are clearly focused on three points: evaluating the stability of the chip in high temperature and high humidity environments; Detecting potential failure issues caused by temperature and humidity; Provide scientific data support for chip reliability.
Compared with traditional temperature and humidity testing (such as 85 ℃/85% RH steady-state testing), HAST achieves the ability to accurately control the temperature and humidity environment under conditions exceeding 100 ℃ by increasing the pressure inside the pressure vessel, greatly shortening the testing cycle.
HAST testing can simulate the aging process of chip usage for several years during the development stage, identify defective chip samples, analyze their failure modes (such as electromigration, corrosion, delamination, etc.), and optimize designs (such as improving wiring, enhancing packaging sealing) or processes (such as optimizing etching parameters, reducing impurity introduction). Through HAST failure analysis, the safe working boundary of the chip in actual use can be determined (such as the maximum temperature and humidity threshold), leaving reasonable margin for design and avoiding cost increase caused by excessive design.
With the development of technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, chips need to operate in more demanding environments, such as high-temperature industrial sites and humid outdoor equipment. HAST can simulate these scenarios and verify the adaptability of the chip in advance.
ZONGLEN's independently developed HAST aging test chamber meets the requirements of chip reliability verification.Compared to traditional high-temperature and high humidity testing, HAST increases the pressure inside the container, enabling temperature and humidity control under conditions exceeding 100 ℃. This can accelerate the aging effects of temperature and humidity (such as migration, corrosion, insulation degradation, material aging, etc.), greatly shorten the reliability evaluation testing cycle, and save time and cost. HAST high accelerated aging testing has become a standard in certain industries, especially in products such as PCBs, semiconductors, solar energy, display panels, etc., as a fast and effective alternative to standard high-temperature and high humidity testing.
Mainly used to evaluate the reliability of non airtight packaged IC devices, metal materials, etc. in humid environments. This experiment examines the effects of high temperature and time on the device under long-term storage conditions of the chip. This device is suitable for HAST testing requirements during the validation testing phase of mass-produced chips, and is only applicable to non sealed packaging (plastic packaging), testing with bias (bHAST), and testing without bias (uHAST).