Abstract
In this chapter, we briefly introduce physical foundations of electromigration (EM) and present two classical EM-related theories. We discuss physical parameters affecting EM wire lifetime and we introduce some background related to the existing EM physical simulators. In our work, for EM physical simulation we adopt the atomic concentration balance-based model. We discuss the simulation setup and results. We present VEMA—a variation-aware electromigration (EM) analysis tool for power grid wires. The tool considers process variations caused by the chemical–mechanical polishing (CMP) and edge placement error (EPE). It uses a compact model that features critical region extraction and variation coefficient calculation. VEMA is a full-chip EM analysis tool; it extracts the effective jL product values and performs a via-centric EM lifetime calculation on ideally manufactured EM-mortal wires. It analyzes process variation effects on EM reliability and reports variation tolerances of EM-sensitive power grid wires.
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Acknowledgments
Research support was provided in part by SRC through IBM Corporation and in part by NSF grant CCF-1115663.
Many people have contributed at various stages to this book chapter. In particular we would like to thank our collaborator from IBM, Dr. Baozhen Li for motivating this work and for support. We also thank Xiang Qiu, Zhong Guan and Ali Abbasinasab from the University of California, Santa Barbara for their helpful discussions.
There also have been many discussions with professors at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In particular, we would like to thank Professor Tim Cheng and Professor Li-C Wang.
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Li, Da., Marek-Sadowska, M., Nassif, S.R. (2015). Layout Aware Electromigration Analysis of Power/Ground Networks. In: Reis, R., Cao, Y., Wirth, G. (eds) Circuit Design for Reliability. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4078-9_8
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