A novel current-estimation approach is developed to support the analysis of electromigration failures in power supply and ground busses of CMOS VLSI circuits. It uses the original concept of probabilistic simulation to e ciently generate accurate estimates of the expected current waveform required for electromigration analysis. As such, the approach is pattern-independent and relieves the desig...

Electromigration driven void dynamics plays an important role in the reliability of copper interconnects; a proper understanding of which is made more difficult due to local variations in line microstructure. In simulations, the parameter which best incorporates these variations is the effective atomic diffusivity D eff which is sensitive to grain size and orientation, interface layer thickness...

Electromigration induced failure development in a copper dual-damascene structure with a through silicon via (TSV) located at the cathode end of the line is studied. The resistance change caused by void growth under the TSV and the interconnect lifetime estimation are modeled based on analytical expressions and also investigated with the help of numerical simulations of fully three-dimensional ...

We have developed a Monte Carlo simulator of the electromigration process in polycrystalline metal stripes. Stripes with different average grain size can be generated with Voronoi tesselation, and mapped onto a network of resistors. The proposed model includes the major role played by grain boundaries and by the current density redistribution within the stripe following void formation. Simulati...

A method to create an array of sub-5 nm nanogaps with self-aligned holes in a protective polymer overlayer is presented. The parallel formation of the nanogaps, intended for electrical sensing of biomolecules in an aqueous environment, is achieved by electromigration using a simple voltage ramp across parallel-connected electrode patterns with individual constrictions. It was observed that the ...

The possibility to make 10 nm scale, and low-disorder, suspended graphene devices would open up many possibilities to study and make use of strongly coupled quantum electronics, quantum mechanics, and optics. We present a versatile method, based on the electromigration of gold-on-graphene bow-tie bridges, to fabricate low-disorder suspended graphene junctions and quantum dots with lengths rangi...

Accurate current analysis is required in circuit designs to analyze electromigration failure rate, power consumption, voltage drop, and so on. A charge-based current model for CMOS gates is presented in this paper. The current waveform of a CMOS gate during a transition consists of three components: one occurs when the input changes and the others exist only when the output changes. These three...

We explore the effect of faceting on possible mechanisms for mass transport around electromigration voids in aluminum interconnects. Motivated by linear response estimates which suggest that particle flux would be much higher along steps than across terraces on a clean aluminum surface, we study step nucleation in the presence of a small driving force along a surface. We find that step nucleati...

In this paper, the Moir e interferometry technique is used to measure the in situ displacement evolution of lead-free solder joint under electric current stressing. Large amounts of deformation were observed in the solder joint under high density (above 5000 A/cm) current stressing. The deformation was found to be due to electromigration in the solder joint and an electromigration constitutive ...