Extraction of Thermal Models for Electromigration Analysis at Advanced Nodes

Reliability issues by electro migration become an increasingly relevant problem for advanced node technologies due to shrinking dimensions and higher power densities. High temperatures reduce the lifetime of interconnects exponentially, therefore an accurate estimation of the temperatures on the entire chip is critical. A numerical methodology for thermal model extraction is developed and applied to provide the necessary thermal input for full-chip electro migration simulation. The methodology is validated by comparison against experimental results with the help of a thermal test structure. Finally, our methodology is applied to a real-world design of an RF power amplifier manufactured in an advanced technology, which is otherwise inaccessible by thermal measurements.