A new statistical methodology predicting chip failure probability considering electromigration

In this research thesis, we present a new approach to analyze chip reliability subject to electromigration (EM) whose fundamental causes and EM phenomenon happened in different materials are presented in this thesis. This new approach utilizes the statistical nature of EM failure in order to assess overall EM risk. It includes within-die temperature variations from the chip's temperature map extracted by an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool to estimate the failure probability of a design. Both the power estimation and thermal analysis are performed in the EDA flow. We first used the traditional EM approach to analyze the design with a single temperature across the entire chip that involves 6 metal and 5 via layers. Next, we used the same traditional approach but with a realistic temperature map. The traditional EM analysis approach and that coupled with a temperature map and the comparison between the results of considering and not considering temperature map are presented in in this research.;A comparison between these two results confirms that using a temperature map yields a less pessimistic estimation of the chip's EM risk. Finally, we employed the statistical methodology we developed considering a temperature map and different use-condition voltages and frequencies to estimate the overall failure probability of the chip. The statistical model established considers the scaling work with the usage of traditional Black equation and four major conditions. The statistical result comparisons are within our expectations. The results of this statistical analysis confirm that the chip level failure probability is higher i) at higher use-condition frequencies for all use-condition voltages, and ii) when a single temperature instead of a temperature map across the chip is considered.;In this thesis, I start with an overall review on current design types, common flows, and necessary verifications and reliability checking steps used in this IC design industry. Furthermore, the important concepts about "Scripting Automation" which is used in all the integration of using diversified EDA tools in this research work are also described in detail with several examples and my completed coding works are also put in the appendix for your reference.;Hopefully, this construction of my thesis will give readers a thorough understanding about my research work from the automation of EDA tools to the statistical data generation, from the nature of EM to the statistical model construction, and the comparisons among the traditional EM analysis and the statistical EM analysis approaches.