The impact of electromigration in copper interconnects on power grid integrity

Electromigration (EM), a growing problem in on-chip interconnects, can cause wire resistances in a circuit to increase under stress, to the point of creating open circuits. Classical circuit-level EM models have two drawbacks: first, they do not accurately capture the physics of degradation in copper dual-damascene (CuDD) metallization, and second, they fail to model the inherent resilience in a circuit that keeps it functioning even after a wire fails. This work overcomes both limitations. For a single wire, our probabilistic analysis encapsulates known realities about CuDD wires, e.g., that some regions of these wires are more susceptible to EM than others, and that void formation/growth show statistical behavior. We apply these ideas to the analysis of on-chip power grids and demonstrate the inherent robustness of these grids that maintains supply integrity under some EM failures.