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9 - Assessment of Electromigration Damage in Large On-Chip Power Grids

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

Paul S. Ho
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Chao-Kun Hu
Affiliation:
IBM T J Watson Research Center, New York
Martin Gall
Affiliation:
GlobalFoundries
Valeriy Sukharev
Affiliation:
Siemens Business
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Summary

A very different picture of the redistribution of metal density and stress, caused by electric stressing, can be expected in multibranch interconnect structures formed by connected metal lines within the same metal layer. The absence of diffusion barriers in line junctions allows atoms to freely migrate between lines along the trajectories of the current carriers. When a multibranch structure includes metal lines that are connected in parallel, the creation of a void in one of the parallel branches does not necessarily result in a failure, which contrasts with what happens in a single line segment, because current can continue to flow in the unvoided parallel lines. The on-chip power/ground (p/g) grid is an example of such electrically redundant multibranch structures. In this chapter, we review a recently developed assessment methodology of the p/g grid MTTF and describe a novel experimental technique that could validate the proposed methodology. EM assessment performed on the grids with tens of millions of nodes has shown that the formation of the first void alone didn’t cause a grid failure. A failure criterion of 10% voltage drop increase was met due to cumulative effect of nucleation of several voids and their growth in the failed branches.

Type
Chapter
Information
Electromigration in Metals
Fundamentals to Nano-Interconnects
, pp. 380 - 413
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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