Reliability-aware global routing under thermal considerations

Abstract

Thermal effect is a key factor to interconnect reliability degradation. As technology scales, the distance between the metal layers and substrate continues to shrink and significantly increases the impact of substrate temperature on interconnect reliability. While it is already a concern in 2D ICs, the thermal impact will be more challenging in the emerging 3D ICs architecture. In this paper, we present a reliability-aware global routing with thermal considerations. We propose two techniques, thermal-driven Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) construction and thermal-driven maze routing, to reduce the probability of interconnect failures. Experimental results show that our router effectively reduces the failure rate by approximately 13% on average, with little overhead on the traditional design objectives.