Statistical Study of Electromigration in Gold Interconnects

Gold metallization used for GaAs devices is susceptible to significant electromigration degradation. In this work, a complete physics-based analysis of electromigration in gold is presented. In particular, the dependence of statistical failure features on the variation of geometric properties is investigated. The experimentally observed dependence of the mean failure time and the associated standard deviation of the failure times on the interconnect geometry is well reproduced by simulations.