Patent 7155359 was granted and assigned to Advanced Micro Devices on December, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
For determining a failure characteristic of a semiconductor device, a leakage current characteristic is measured for the semiconductor device to determine a plurality of stress bias zones. A respective set of parameters that define a respective failure characteristic of the semiconductor device is determined for each of the stress bias zones such that the failure characteristic is accurately determined for a wide range of operating voltages.