Predicting electromigration mortality under temperature and product lifetime specifications

Abstract

Today's methodologies for electromigration (EM) identify EM-susceptible wires based on their current density, using the Blech criterion to filter out wires that are EM-immortal. The Blech criterion is agnostic to the product lifetime and temperature conditions: many Blech-mortal wires may never experience EM during the product lifetime. We develop new methods that evaluate the transient evolution of stress, relative to the product lifetime, and present an improved set of simple and practical mortality criteria. On a set of power grid benchmarks, we demonstrate that the actual number of mortal wires may depend strongly on the lifetime and reliability conditions.