Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 159 - 172
• Main Authors: Zhijian Lu, Wei Huang, Stan, M.R., Skadron, K., Lach, J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway, NJ IEEE 01.02.2007; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Circuit design; Circuit optimization; Circuit synthesis; Consumption; Costs; Current density; Design; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; dynamic reliability management (DRM); Dynamic stress; dynamic thermal management (DTM); electromigration (EM); Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Integrated circuit interconnections; Integrated circuit packaging; Integrated circuits; Interconnections; Mathematical models; Power system interconnection; Power system modeling; Power system reliability; reliability-aware design; Resource management; Run time (computers); Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Studies; Temperature dependence; temperature gradients; Thermal factors; Very large scale integration; Performance evaluation; System management; Circuit design; Thermal management (packaging); Temperature effect; Dynamic stress; Modeling; dynamic thermal management (DTM); Electronic packaging; electromigration (EM); Electrodiffusion; Dynamic model; Current density; Execution time; Temperature dependence; High performance; Power circuit; Thermal behavior; temperature gradients; Durability; Temperature gradient; Interconnection; reliability-aware design; Integrated circuit; Numerical simulation; dynamic reliability management (DRM); Reliability; Power integrated circuits
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2007.893578

Thermal effects are becoming a limiting factor in high-performance circuit design due to the strong temperature dependence of leakage power, circuit performance, IC package cost, and reliability. While many interconnect reliability models assume a constant temperature, this paper analyzes the effects of temporal and spatial thermal gradients on interconnect lifetime in terms of electromigration, and presents a physics-based dynamic reliability model which returns reliability equivalent temperature and current density that can be used in traditional reliability analysis tools. The model is verified with numerical simulations and reveals that blindly using the maximum temperature leads to too pessimistic lifetime estimation. Therefore, the proposed model not only increases the accuracy of reliability estimates, but also enables designers to reclaim design margin in reliability-aware design. In addition, the model is useful for improving the performance of temperature-aware runtime management by modeling system lifetime as a resource to be consumed at a stress-dependent rate