Cell-Internal Electromigration: Analysis and Pin Placement Based Optimization

Gracieli Posser; Vivek Mishra; Palkesh Jain; Ricardo Reis; Sachin S. Sapatnekar

doi:10.1109/TCAD.2015.2456427

Cell-Internal Electromigration: Analysis and Pin Placement Based Optimization

Gracieli Posser, Vivek Mishra, Palkesh Jain, Ricardo Reis, Sachin S. Sapatnekar

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Electromigration (EM) in on-chip metal interconnects is a critical reliability-driven failure mechanism in nanometer-scale technologies. This paper addresses the problem of EM on signal interconnects and on Vdd and Vss rails within a standard cell. An approach for modeling and efficient characterization of cell-internal EM is developed, incorporating Joule heating effects. We also present a graph-based algorithm that computes the currents when the pin position is moved avoiding a new characterization for each pin position and consequently considerably reducing the characterization time. We use the cell lifetime analysis to determine the lifetime of large benchmark circuits, and show that these circuit lifetimes can be improved by about 2.5 × - 161 × by avoiding the EM-critical output, Vdd, and Vss pin positions of the cells, using minor layout modifications.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	7156109
Pages (from-to)	220-231
Number of pages	12
Journal	IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Volume	35
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2015.2456427
State	Published - Feb 2016

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by Semiconductor Research Corporation under Grant 2012-TJ-2234, in part by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq-Brazil), and in part by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)

Publisher Copyright:
© 1982-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

Cell-internal Signal Electromigration
Current Divergence
EDA
Electromigration
Joule Heating
Physical Design

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abstract = "Electromigration (EM) in on-chip metal interconnects is a critical reliability-driven failure mechanism in nanometer-scale technologies. This paper addresses the problem of EM on signal interconnects and on Vdd and Vss rails within a standard cell. An approach for modeling and efficient characterization of cell-internal EM is developed, incorporating Joule heating effects. We also present a graph-based algorithm that computes the currents when the pin position is moved avoiding a new characterization for each pin position and consequently considerably reducing the characterization time. We use the cell lifetime analysis to determine the lifetime of large benchmark circuits, and show that these circuit lifetimes can be improved by about 2.5 × - 161 × by avoiding the EM-critical output, Vdd, and Vss pin positions of the cells, using minor layout modifications.",

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Cell-Internal Electromigration: Analysis and Pin Placement Based Optimization

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