Understanding the physics of failures and failure mechanisms enables reliability analysis and serves as a practical guide for electronic devices design, integration, systems development and manufacturing. The field gains additional importance in the context of managing safety, sustainability and environmental impact for continuously increasing complexity and scaling-down trends in electronics.

Reliability and availability are basic properties for safe and sustainable products in communications, energy and medical technology, air and space applications, and electronics. They are described as stochastic and physical processes and have to be optimized with functionality, environmental impact and life cycle costs in development phase already. The required basics will be taught.