Electromigration sayang is the key word in this topic for Processors.

Capacitors suffer from Dielectric degradation, slippage, contamination and cummulative ESR effects as the voltage gets bumped up.

Traces can burn out due to overcurrent (bridge wire principle), but generally heat degrades components by allowing materials to react faster with other materials, oxidization is good example and such.

But generally there's nothing to be afraid off once you stave off the short term problems like explosive loads and heat since most semi conductors are made to withstand decades of use.

First of all heat isn't related, since it just damages the physical lattice and increases environment reaction rates.

Problems due to electron flow is called electromigration, as you raise the voltage, the force behind and electron continues to grow with it, the electron is already moving at C which is as fast as the laws of physics allow for, but then it doesn't stop it increasing it's kenetic energy, and that kenetic energy will eventually thin out and break those mircoscopic traces.

Resistance is another point, semiconductors require resistance to operate. It's by the laws of physics that for any action, some energy must be put it, so the switching of a transistor (which uses heat or energy to allow the source and drain to connect) must have resistance. Generally it's the use of logic, good placement, less redundancy, higher IPC and better processes that allow for less heat. Since generally all transistors are the same and switch using the same amount of energy, it's just a problem of needed switching and other factors.

Particles do not break unless you can overcome the electrostatic forces detailed in Coloumb's law and the strong force (one of the 4 fundemental forces) that binds the atoms together. There is decay, but the amount of time it takes for such particles to decay is insanely long


Generally if kept within the confines of the process limitations, procs can survive a very long time. Semiconductor based OPAMPs already have an MTBF of 10^12 hours and that's damned long lol. Same goes generally with processors, unless you take them far past their process specifications (Eg; Intel 90nm, AMD 90nm SOI, TSMC 80nm)

This post has been edited by empire23: Aug 4 2006, 04:06 AM

I meant All transistors on the same piece of silicon lah . I know SOI and Strained Silicon have far different switching characteristic and there are tons more processes with different variables.