Effect of thermal gradients on the electromigration life-time in power electronics

Nguyen, H.V.; Salm, Cora; Krabbenborg, B.H.; Weide‐Zaage, Kirsten; Bisschop, J.; Mouthaan, A.J.; Kuper, F.G.

doi:10.1109/relphy.2004.1315418

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…A significant drop in the median time to failure occurs if the temperature gradient is in the opposite direction. Nguyen et al [23] performed similar experiments with built-in heating element in the EM test structure. From their experiments, they found that the time to failure with temperature gradients of 0.09, 0.19 and 0.28 K/Am were reduced to 90%, 40% and 9% of the time to failure without temperature gradient, respectively.…”

Section: Experimental Evidencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation of the effect of temperature and stress gradients on accelerated EM test for Cu narrow interconnects

Tan

Roy

2006

Thin Solid Films

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Section: Experimental Evidencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation of the effect of temperature and stress gradients on accelerated EM test for Cu narrow interconnects

Tan

Roy

2006

Thin Solid Films

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“…(21) and (22)] allows us to assess the importance of the lognormal standard deviation (or shape factor d ) of the grain size distribution on the probability of early failure P cf in near-bamboo as-patterned aluminum lines. It is clear from Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of microstructure on the probability of early failure in aluminum-based interconnects

Dwyer

2004

Journal of Applied Physics

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• For electromigration in short aluminum interconnects terminated by tungsten vias, the well known "short-line" effect applies. In a similar manner, for longer lines, early failure is determined by a critical value L crit for the length of polygranular clusters. Any cluster shorter than L crit is "immortal" on the time scale of early failure where the figure of merit is not the standard t 50 value (the time to 50% failures), but rather the total probability of early failure, P cf . P cf is a complex function of current density, linewidth, line length, and material properties (the median grain size d 50 and grain size shape factor d ). It is calculated here using a model based around the theory of runs, which has proved itself to be a useful tool for assessing the probability of extreme events. Our analysis shows that P cf is strongly dependent on d , and a change in d from 0.27 to 0.5 can cause an order of magnitude increase in P cf under typical test conditions. This has implications for the web-based two-dimensional grain-growth simulator MIT/EmSim, which generates grain patterns with d = 0.27, while typical as-patterned structures are better represented by a d in the range 0.4 -0.6. The simulator will consequently overestimate interconnect reliability due to this particular electromigration failure mode.

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“…Guo et al [22] reported that EM in aluminum interconnect is strongly affected by the relative direction of electron wind and thermal gradients, while Nguyen et al [23] found that temperature gradients greatly enhance EM in aluminum interconnect. Following the stress build-up model introduced in Section II, the atomic flux due to EM can be modeled by , and the stress build-up at a specific location is caused by the divergence of atomic flux at that location, i.e.,…”

Section: A Em Model With Spatial Thermal Gradientsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When compared with (4), (11) introduces a third term , which captures the atomic flux divergence induced by spatial thermal gradients along the interconnect. Although temperature gradient itself will cause migrations of atoms from high temperature to low temperature, a phenomenon called thermomigration (TM), the atomic flux due to TM is generally believed to be much smaller than that due to EM [23]. Therefore, TM is not explicitly modeled in (11).…”

Section: A Em Model With Spatial Thermal Gradientsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

Huang

Stan

et al. 2007

IEEE Trans. VLSI Syst.

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Abstract-Thermal effects are becoming a limiting factor in high-performance circuit design due to the strong temperature dependence of leakage power, circuit performance, IC package cost, and reliability. While many interconnect reliability models assume a constant temperature, this paper analyzes the effects of temporal and spatial thermal gradients on interconnect lifetime in terms of electromigration, and presents a physics-based dynamic reliability model which returns reliability equivalent temperature and current density that can be used in traditional reliability analysis tools. The model is verified with numerical simulations and reveals that blindly using the maximum temperature leads to too pessimistic lifetime estimation. Therefore, the proposed model not only increases the accuracy of reliability estimates, but also enables designers to reclaim design margin in reliability-aware design. In addition, the model is useful for improving the performance of temperature-aware runtime management by modeling system lifetime as a resource to be consumed at a stress-dependent rate.Index Terms-Dynamic stress, dynamic reliability management (DRM), dynamic thermal management (DTM), electromigration (EM), reliability-aware design, temperature gradients.

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Effect of thermal gradients on the electromigration life-time in power electronics

Cited by 22 publications

References 7 publications

Investigation of the effect of temperature and stress gradients on accelerated EM test for Cu narrow interconnects

Investigation of the effect of temperature and stress gradients on accelerated EM test for Cu narrow interconnects

The influence of microstructure on the probability of early failure in aluminum-based interconnects

Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

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