Interconnect Lifetime Prediction for Reliability-Aware Systems

Abstract—Thermal effects are becoming a limiting factor in high-performance circuit design due to the strong temperature dependence of leakage power, circuit performance, IC package cost, and reliability. While many interconnect reliability models assume a constant temperature, this paper analyzes the effects of temporal and spatial thermal gradients on interconnect lifetime in terms of electromigration, and presents a physics-based dynamic reliability model which returns reliability equivalent temperature and current density that can be used in traditional reliability analysis tools. The model is verified with numerical simulations and reveals that blindly using the maximum temperature leads to too pessimistic lifetime estimation. Therefore, the proposed model not only increases the accuracy of reliability estimates, but also enables designers to reclaim design margin in reliability-aware design. In addition, the model is useful for improving the performance of temperature-aware runtime management by modeling system lifetime as a resource to be consumed at a stress-dependent rate. Index Terms—Dynamic stress, dynamic reliability management (DRM), dynamic thermal management (DTM), electromigration (EM), reliability-aware design, temperature gradients. I