Microelectronic systems such as cell phones, computers, consumer electronics, and implantable medical devices consist of subsystems which in turn consist of other subsystems and components. When such systems are designed, fabricated, assembled, and tested, they need to meet reliability, cost, performance, and other targets for being competitive.

The design of reliable electronic packaging systems in a systematic and timely manner requires a consistent and unified construct for allocating, predicting, and assessing reliability and recommending design changes at the component and system level with consideration of both random and wearout failures. Accordingly, this thesis has been developed a unified knowledge modeling method for System Design for Reliability (SDfR) called Reliability Object Model (ROM) method. The developed ROM method can address both reliability allocation and assessment consistently for systems consisting of series and parallel subsystems. The effectiveness of the ROM method has been demonstrated for allocating, predicting, and assessing reliability, and the results show that the developed method is more effective compared to existing methods, providing richer semantics, unified techniques, and improved SDfR quality. Also, this thesis has developed representative reliability metrics for random and wearout failures, and incorporated such metrics with the representative algorithms for allocation, assessment, and design change recommendations. Finally, this work has implemented the developed ROM method in a computing framework and demonstrated its applicability using several complex microelectronic system test cases and prototype SDfR tools.