Electromigration Study for Multiscale Power/Ground Vias in TSV-Based 3-D ICs

Electromigration (EM) in power distribution networks (PDNs) is a major reliability issue in 3-D ICs. While the EM issues of local vias and through-silicon-vias (TSV) have been studied separately, the interplay of TSVs and conventional local vias in 3-D ICs has not been well investigated. This co-design is necessary when the die-to-die vertical power delivery is done using both TSVs and local interconnects. In this paper, we model EM for PDNs of 3-D ICs with a focus on multiscale via (MSV) structure, i.e., TSVs and local vias used together for vertical power delivery. We study the impact of structure, material, and preexisting void conditions on the EM-related lifetime of our MSV structures. We also investigate the transient IR-voltage change of full-chip level 3-D PDNs with MSVs with our model. The experimental results demonstrate that our EM modeling can effectively capture the EM reliability of the full-chip level 3-D PDNs with MSVs, which can be hard to achieve by the traditional EM analysis based on the individual local via or the TSV.