Impact of Redundancy and Line Extension on Short-Length Effect in Electromigration Reliability
 
Impact of Redundancy and Line Extension on Short-Length Effect in Electromigration Reliability 
 
Simone Esposto, Simone Esposto, Ivan Ciofi, Ivan Ciofi, Giuliano Sisto, Giuliano Sisto, Kristof Croes, Kristof Croes, Dragomir Milojevic, Dragomir Milojevic, Houman Zahedmanesh, Houman Zahedmanesh
 
Abstract 

This study investigates electromigration in a double-redundancy interconnect configuration, commonly found at standard-cell level in the power delivery networks, under downstream electron flow conditions, using both experiments and physics-based simulations. This work sheds light on the critical jL product, (jL)c , in presence of a parallel path. Due to double redundancy, for our samples coming from a 28nm commercial technology node, the critical current density jc was found to increase by 1.15-fold and 1.1-fold, for 5\% and 20\% R-shift failure criteria, respectively. The impact of line extension on (jL)c was also investigated. A 37\% decrease in (jL)c was observed for a single line with a passive line extension acting as a sink, undermining the short-length effect, regardless of the failure criterion. For the same target lifetime, a 1.2-fold increase in maximum allowable current density, based on a 50\% target failure percentile and 10 years lifetime criterion, was obtained when comparing the single and double redundancy configurations for 5\% R-shift.