Impact of off-state leakage current on electromigration design rules for nanometer scale CMOS technologies

This paper introduces the idea of electrothermally coupled evaluation of junction temperature to accurately estimate the lifetime of interconnects under electromigration (EM) constraints in leakage dominant technologies. The junction temperature thus evaluated with our proposed methodology is incorporated into the interconnect temperature-rise equation (which includes Joule-heating) and is solved self-consistently with both unipolar and bipolar EM lifetime equations to estimate accurate interconnect metal temperature and to provide comprehensive design guidelines for maximum allowable current density in power/ground and signal lines.