Interconnect reliability assurance for circuits with billions of transistors

The small number of atoms involved in a 20nm conductor makes the conductor susceptible to the local variation in stress, grain structure and surrounding dielectric consistency. This leads to a larger variation in the performance of each metal line or via. At the same time, we increase the number of metal lines on a chip. The results is a complex failure distribution that will require design mitigation to accomplish the goals set for the product.