Study of the Interconnect Failure Mechanism and Micro-effort for ULSI

: Interconnect reliability has been regarded as a discipline that must be seriously taken into account from the early design phase of ultra large scale integration (ULSI). A synthetic review of valuable solutions to improve interconnect reliability is proposed in this paper. At first, a comprehensive review of the interconnect failure mechanisms and micro-efforts are carried out. Four types of interconnect failure mechanisms including EM, SM, TM and TDDB are illustrated in detail. Depending on their different effects for failure, the interconnect micro-effects are classified into the positive effects including the short-length effect, self-healing effect, reservoir effect and the negative effects which involves the skin effect, joule heating, current crowding , bandwidth, coupled noise, parasitic, RC delay, crosstalk and power dissipation and so on. Secondly, a novel qualitative evaluation method based on the radar chart has been presented, which visually shows the contrast of the key performance related to the interconnect failures. These present results might provide some valuable guidance for the study of IC interconnect reliability.