Dear Colleagues,

Reliability is becoming a key issue in nowadays’ electronic systems. With their smartness, circuit modules are becoming more and more complex, device sizes are in the range of nanometer size and their interconnection systems have to be realized with high density having small size lines and spaces.  With size reduction, the failure possibilities became higher since a large number of environmentally driven material processes (corrosion, electrochemical migration, intermetallic formation, whisker growth) may result in failures. With the development of IoT, M2M (machine to machine communication in manufacturing lines), self-driving autonomous cars and vehicles, the continuous human control over the electronic modules will slowly be lost and their reliable operation must be realized by themselves. Thus their long term reliable operation is essential in such environments.

In a large number of applications, electronic modules operate in harsh environmental conditions, so the long-term behaviour of the applied materials is also critical. Failure analysis became an important area in investigating root causes of circuit failures coming from the field – NFF (No Fault Found) type solutions are not allowed any more. There is a strong need to designate the failure mechanisms based on multidisciplinary investigation and modelling in order to provide information for material design aspects.

This Special Issue is dedicated to disseminating the recent advancements and latest results in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary research field. We invite colleagues to contribute to this Special Issue in the aforementioned topics and keywords with full papers, short communications, and reviews. The Special Issue focuses on electronic reliability and failure analysis, but other related topics are also welcome! 

Prof. Dr. Gabor Harsanyi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Materials is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• electronic failures
• failure analysis
• electrochemical migration
• dendritic growth
• whisker growth
• corrosion
• intermetallic formation
• electro-migration
• a acelerated lifetime investigations
• reliability predictions