Statistics for microelectronics

This paper introduces a special issue entirely devoted to the topic ’Statistics for Microelectronics’. The relevance of the theme for this journal is due to both the primary role that microelectronics has in many business activities of the modern society and to the complexity of the production process of integrated circuits that are obtained by several different steps performed on a wafer (i.e., a thin silicon slice of a few inches of diameter). Advanced statistical methods are necessary to monitor and improve this process because the yield of this industrial manufacturing is typically tiny and requires a very high precision. After a brief review of the semiconductor manufacturing process, we point out how statistical methodologies can contribute to this. Finally, we introduce the papers that discuss some key aspects of this subject.