Aggressive scaling of device feature sizes has enabled the tremendous increase in performance of microeletronic products. Unfortunately, yield and reliability concerns of microelectronic devices come also into play concurrently with these advances in semiconductor technology due to the physical limts that are being  reached in current nanotechnology.

Device miniaturization results in reduced design and process margins which cause an increased susceptibility of microelectronic systems to failures during operation. Additionally, manufacturing yield is lowered due to material defects and process parameter variations.