Impact of skin effect, resistive and dielectric losses on the input voltage waveforms of current estimation for ULSI interconnects

In this work, a series connection system of interconnects and gates is studied. In the system, we focus on skin effect, resistive and dielectric losses in previous level interconnects and the impact of their variations on the input voltage waveform V_in(t) of the post level interconnects. The changes in cross-section dimensions of interconnects are used to represent their differences in resistances, dielectric losses and skin effect in actual circuits or to represent the process of electromigration (EM). Through the analysis of the voltage transfer function of interconnects, the different roles of skin effect, resistive and dielectric losses in signal attenuations for interconnects of various cross-sections are pointed out. The study shows that the rise time of V_in(t) increases as the cross-section size of the previous level interconnect decreases. As V_in(t) is an important parameter in the fast current estimations of the post level interconnects, this effect must be taken into account for higher accuracy in the reliability calculation.