RICHARD C. BLISH, II

Vice Chapter Chairman, Santa Clara Valley Chapter, CPMT Society

Rich earned a BS in Physics and MS + PhD in Materials Science, all at Caltech. Rich then spent 2 yr as an Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Labs, Murray Hill, correlating mechanical damage to electrical performance of PicturePhone camera tubes and other semiconductor materials. His next tour of duty was 11 years at Signetics as MTS & Sr Scientist in Failure Analysis and physical chemistry. Rich then moved into engineering management for 15 years at Intel in variety of Package Reliability Engineering roles. He then took a short flyer in a startup, and has been at AMD now for ~3 years so far, as Sr MTS in Reliability Engineering, concentrating on failure rate modeling and oxide reliability. Rich has published 17 papers, including best papers at ‘84 IRPS & ‘’86 ECTC. Much of the recent publication activity has been invited, including a book chapter. Rich has 5 US patents issued to his credit and 15 more are pending. Rich is a long-standing IEEE member, former member of the Electrochemical Society, General Chair ’94 IRPS, Chairman of Board of Directors ’95 IRPS, serving on the BOD for 4 years, and is continuing as member of the IRPS Technical Program Committee for Packaging.

Rich has been actively involved in the Santa Clara Valley Section CPMT Society Chapter for three years, serving as Secretary from 1995 to 1997 and as Vice Chapter Chair since 1997. His phone number is +1-408-749-5838, but a quick email message also gets to him.

Rich Blish will talk at the 13 May 1998 meeting of the Silicon Valley Section of CPMT on "Reports of Arrhenius’ Death are Greatly Exaggerated." There have been several recent publications, even a full book, taking aim at the deficiencies of MIL HDBK 217 for failure rate prediction. Rich will make the case that MIL 217 is a worthy target, but that the widely used Arrhenius model for thermal activation has suffered collateral damage. In fact, one can derive the Arrhenius model directly from fundamental physics and quantum mechanics (left as an exercise for the student). Attacks on Arrhenius challenging its validity are specious, the authors having made unrealistic simplifying assumptions.