Electromigration Analysis of Signal Nets

Abstract: The scaling down of technologies presents new challenges in reliability, one of them being electromigration. Electromigration was not cause of concern until interconnects widths shrunk to the micrometer scale. At this point, research was focused into electromigration analysis of interconnects. International conferences on reliability have recognized electromigration as one of the biggest problems in reliability. This thesis focuses on electromigration analysis of signal nets and was carried out in Design Methodology department at a company in Eindhoven. The purpose of this thesis work was to setup a flow for electromigration analysis using existing tools at the company. Comparison of  tools and theoretical study of electromigration also forms a big part of this internship. A summary of theoretical studies on electromigration phenomenon and their implications on  design parameters is investigated in this thesis report. The approach of setting up tools, evaluation strategy and results of the evaluation are also documented in this report. Lastly a conclusion in a form of an effective design methodology and comparison of tools are presented. This report also contains challenges encountered while setting up of tools and motivation for enabling different options for electromigration analysis. Trade-offs between simulation run time, parasitic extraction, chip area and reliability concerns are also discussed in this report.