Impacts of frequency, thin-film, barrier thickness, and temperature on interconnect resistance and propagation delay

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the impacts of frequency, thin-film, barrier-thickness, and temperature on the resistance of interconnects in high performance integrated circuits. It has been demonstrated that variations of these parameters leads to significantly higher interconnect resistance, which in turn increases the propagation delay. Simulation results show that the resistance could go up as much as by 55% and the delay could increase as much as by 50.5%. These observations illustrate the importance of taking these effects into consideration during circuit characterization and timing analysis.