Standard · Standards & Organisations
AEC-Q100 (Automotive Electronics Council Failure Mechanism Based Stress Test Qualification for Integrated Circuits)
The qualification specification that defines the stress tests, temperature grades and sample requirements an integrated circuit must pass to be sold as automotive grade.
Grades 0 to 3 correspond to progressively lower maximum ambient temperatures.
- Also known as
- Q100
- Type
- Standard
- Domain
- Standards & Organisations, Automotive & functional safety
- Also relevant to
- Automotive, Reliability & Quality
Notes
Companion documents cover discretes (Q101), passives (Q200) and multichip modules (Q104); Grade 1 at 125 °C is the common automotive baseline.
Overview
AEC-Q100 is the Automotive Electronics Council's stress test qualification specification for integrated circuits, and passing it is the usual basis on which a supplier offers a chip as automotive grade. It sets out which accelerated stress, reliability and electrical tests a new IC, or an existing one after a major change, must pass, with sample sizes and acceptance criteria tied to the part's temperature grade. Companion documents cover other parts, such as AEC-Q101 for discrete semiconductors and AEC-Q200 for passive components.
How it works
The supplier first picks a temperature grade, which sets the ambient range the part must survive: Grade 0 is -40 °C to 150 °C, Grade 1 is -40 °C to 125 °C, Grade 2 is -40 °C to 105 °C and Grade 3 is -40 °C to 85 °C. Stress conditions are more demanding for the hotter grades, and parts are tested before and after stress at room and hot temperature; Texas Instruments, by contrast, tests its commercial parts only at room temperature after stress.
The tests fall into groups: accelerated environmental stress (preconditioning, humidity with bias, temperature cycling, powered temperature cycling and high temperature storage), accelerated lifetime simulation (high temperature operating life, early life failure rate, and endurance and data retention for non-volatile memory), package assembly integrity, die fabrication reliability (electromigration, dielectric breakdown, hot carrier and bias temperature instability), electrical verification (ESD, latch-up and parameter distributions) and defect screening such as part average testing. Many stresses use 77 parts from each of three lots, run for about 1,000 hours, and allow zero failures.
The results go into a qualification report that customers commonly receive as part of the production part approval package. AEC-Q100 is a baseline: suppliers often add their own checks, such as burn-in of application boards, and customers may ask for evidence against their own mission profile.
Examples
- Samsung's ISOCELL Auto image sensors, which Samsung lists as AEC-Q100 Grade 2.
- A Grade 0 part intended for under-hood use, qualified under more demanding stress conditions than a Grade 3 part.
- Weebit Nano's work towards AEC-Q100 qualification of embedded memory, which requires endurance and retention tests on three lots of 77 parts.
- Texas Instruments qualifying automotive devices to the AEC-Q100 revision current when each device is released.
- A supplier adding 1,000 hours of burn-in on application boards on top of the AEC-Q100 tests.
Related terms
Part of the Standards & Organisations glossary, with every term in the topic and the lifecycles, tools and standards that use them.
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