Intelligent Reliability 4.0 (iRel4.0)

The history of reliability as we know it now goes back to the 1950s, when electronics started to play a major role for the first time. Now, 7 decades later, with million times more complex electronic systems, the industry is facing a continuous increase of early and wear-out failures with accompanying consequences. Nowadays, products with high failure rates may come under public scrutiny due to negative customer feedback publicly shared on websites, eventually building bad reputation for a company.

In this EU project, with 79 partners from 14 countries, the aim is to find solutions to cope with the ever increasing complexity of reliability topics and to find processes, methods and digitized universal procedures for covering the various domains of electronic components and systems. TUDelft contributes within this project with three PhD positions, each focussing on a different topic:

1. Development of multi-scale multi-physics and data-driven models for digital twinning. A digital twin is an exact digital copy of an electronic component or system including all relevant physical properties, and ideally the digital twin uses sensor data from the field in order to simulate real-world counterpart. In this project, the PhD candidate will investigate together with industrial partners like Signify the development of multi-scale models and methods of analysing data from the field in order to perform lifetime predictions.
2. Development of testing methods and investigating the reliability of novel interconnect materials in electronic packaging. Together with Signify, the PhD candidate will aim to improve the reliability of novel interconnect materials within electronic packages. This will include modelling, the development of an improved testing methodology for electrical-thermal-mechanical testing and investigating the physical failure mechanisms of the material.
3. Development of harsh environment smart sensors using wide bandgap materials. This PhD project aims at developing novel smart sensors which can operate in harsh environments (e.g. high temperature, pressure, chemically corrosive conditions). Ultimately the sensors should consist of a monolithically integrated sensor with electronics based on wide bandgap semiconductors, which can, for instance, be used to monitor power electronics.

For more information, see the project homepage.