Temperature gradient impact on electromigration failure in VLSI metallization

Guo, Weipeng; Li, Z.; Zhu, Huayang; Zhang, W.; Ji, Yanfeng; Sun, Yinghua; Shen, Guozhen

doi:10.1109/stherm.1998.660397

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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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%

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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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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“…But some studies have shown that interconnect lifetime under electrical stress degrades significantly in the presence of static thermal gradients too suggesting that thermomigration (or temperaturegradient-enhanced electromigration) is also of major concern [7]- [10] and these thermal gradients will likely increase in emerging processes with projected increases in both the total number of processing cores and the total die power dissipation. Experimental results have shown that negative or positive thermal gradients can either improve or reduce mean time to failure (MTF) [7] in the presence of electrical stress. Assessments of the severity of temperature gradients on electromigraiton and reliability are discussed in [8][9][10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ultra-small on-chip sensor for temperature and thermal gradient measurements

Wang

Zhao

Chen

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference (NAECON)

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An ultra-small, low-power CMOS temperature sensor designed for multi-site temperature and temperature gradient monitoring to support power/thermal management in integrated circuits where electromigration limits system reliability is proposed. The temperature sensor utilizes the temperature characteristics of the threshold voltage of MOS transistors to sense temperature and is highly linear throughout the temperature range required for power/thermal management and has good accuracy throughout this range with calibration at a single temperature.Prototype temperature sensors have been designed in a TSMC 0.18μm process with a 1.8V supply voltage. The sensing device has a very small die area of only 2.5μm×6.2μm and a low power consumption of about 0.95μW at a 1% duty cycle making it suitable for multi-site thermal monitoring.

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“…Several phenomena can influence contact quality [1][2][3][4], however the critical step we are interested in, is the etch process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Pattern Recognition Tool for Automatic Etch Process Quality Check

Russo

2008

2008 IEEE/SEMI Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference

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This paper presents an automatic tool for image analysis applied to semiconductor in-line inspections. The goal of this tool is to understand automatically which contacts in the wafer have been not completely etched during the plasma process and an etch step. For this reason we developed an algorithm able to classify the observed structures in scanning electron microscope (SEM) inspections. Such recognition provides a quick and detailed analysis of the under-etched contacts, which is based on fixed rules and thus objective. Automation controls, applied to the tool results, allow for complete monitoring of etch chambers and of the SEM images quality as well. Applying this tool should result in cost saving and yield increase.

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Temperature gradient impact on electromigration failure in VLSI metallization

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

An ultra-small on-chip sensor for temperature and thermal gradient measurements

A Pattern Recognition Tool for Automatic Etch Process Quality Check

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