Evaluation of constant voltage testing for electromigration study

Zhang, Z.; McGowan, B. T.; Feldmaier, Z.; Lloyd, J. R.; McMullen, Timothy; Wilcox, E.; Schultz, S.

doi:10.1109/irps.2013.6532078

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Hence, we believe a revision of the EM-test methodology is needed and that constant voltage EM (CV-EM) testing could become more appropriate to characterize EM for advanced interconnects. Also note that another advantage of CV-EM is earlier reported in [5,6], where it is proposed that CI-EM is more affected by variations in cross sectional area, where this type of variations can become problematic and remedial measures are being taken [7]. The authors argue in [5,6] that, as V=J* *L (where V, J, , L are voltage, current density, resistivity and the length of line respectively), a constant voltage stress does not depend on the variation of the cross sectional area, suggesting that CV-EM becomes a more appropriate method to study intrinsic EM without taking process variability into account.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Constant voltage electromigration for advanced BEOL copper interconnects

Tang

Croes

Jourdan

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium

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For characterizing the electromigration (EM) reliability of advanced interconnects, we propose a constant voltage approach (CV-EM) as an alternative method to traditional constant current tests (CI-EM). As extremely scaled interconnects require very thin barriers, their current shunting capabilities will be reduced. When close to full void formation, we show that this lack of current shunting capability leads to unrealistically high stress conditions during CI-EM while more realistic stresses are induced during CV-EM. We also demonstrate that the void detection capability is highly improved after CV-EM. We use simulations and experiments to compare CV-EM with CI-EM where we obtain a) slightly longer lifetimes for CV-EM, b) the same failure mechanisms and c) similar E a and n values.

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