Foreword: Special Section on “The Reliability of Advanced Microelectronic Packaging—Part I: Management of Thermal Effects”

Modern technologies and devices ranging from smartphones, computers, cloud computing, industrial automation, and automobiles to the Internet of Things are enabled by integrated circuits (ICs) and their associated packages. The ICs have evolved from the early small-scale integration (SSI) to the later more complex very-large-scale integration (VLSI) and the subsequent ultra-large-scale integration (ULSI), in a continuous quest for improved functionality, higher performance, smaller form factors, and lower cost. The rate at which metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) counts on a chip have increased has generally followed Moore's law, which states that the transistor count per chip doubles approximately every two years.