Evaluation of the Pulse Ohmic Non-Linearity Technique as a Reliability Tool for Predicting Susceptibility to Electromigration Damage

The degree of correlation between time to failure by electromigration stressing and pulse ohmic - non-linearity was found to depend markedly on the stress conditions. Only the highest stress and highest joule heating resulted in good correlation. Also, a simple resistance measurement was found to correlate as well with time to failure as pulse non-linearity. It was concluded that pulse non-linearity techniques are of limited usefulness as a reliability tool for all but those applications where severe joule heating is present.