On wires driven by a few electrons

When analyzing reliability, wires have mostly been ignored, and gates and devices have taken the lion´s share. With scaling, this computing-level approach will become less-and-less accurate as communication (wires) will also start failing. Trying to do justice to communication, this paper details a reliability analysis of wires following on the few papers which have made wires´ reliability their concern. We will use a classical particlelike probabilistic approach to enhance on the accuracy of the wires´ length-dependent probabilities of failure due to the discreetness of charge. Integrating intrinsic noises, such a communication approach leads to ldquolower boundrdquo-like wire reliability estimates - as ignoring extrinsic noises, variations, and defects. These results should have implications for design strategies of emerging nano-architectures, as well as multi/many-cores and networks-on-chip.