Title
The need and opportunities of electromigration-aware integrated circuit design
Abstract
Electromigration (EM) is becoming a progressively severe reliability challenge due to increased interconnect current densities. A shift from traditional (post-layout) EM verification to robust (pro-active) EM-aware design - where the circuit layout is designed with individual EM-robust solutions - is urgently needed. This tutorial will give an overview of EM and its effects on the reliability of present and future integrated circuits (ICs). We introduce the physical EM process and present its specific characteristics that can be affected during physical design. Examples of EM countermeasures which are applied in today's commercial design flows are presented. We show how to improve the EM-robustness of metallization patterns and we also consider mission profiles to obtain application-oriented current-density limits. The increasing interaction of EM with thermal migration is investigated as well. We conclude with a discussion of application examples to shift from the current post-layout EM verification towards an EM-aware physical design process. Its methodologies, such as EM-aware routing, increase the EM-robustness of the layout with the overall goal of reducing the negative impact of EM on the circuit's reliability.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3240765.3265971
ICCAD-IEEE ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
Keywords
Field
DocType
Reliability,Electromigration urrent Density,Thermal Migration
Current density,Computer science,Electrical conductor,Electronic engineering,Design flow,Integrated circuit design,Physical design,Electromigration,Interconnection,Integrated circuit
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1933-7760
978-1-4503-5950-4
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Steve Bigalke132.25
Jens Lienig225531.18
Göran Jerke3345.19
Jürgen Scheible4144.07
Roland Jancke561.92