Budget-based reliability management to handle impact of thermal issues in 16nm technology

Abstract

We handle the thermal impact on FEOL and BEOL reliability by using new aging simulation flow and EM checking flow which is considering thermal coupling effects from both FinFET SHE and metal wire JHE. We demonstrated how the budget-based reliability checking flow works with thermal issues and showed that it checks product risk more rigorously and less conservatively. It results in providing more freedom to circuit designers by allowing higher temperature increase and thus helping them to achieve high performance circuit.