Author(s)

L.J. Gray

Abstract

A primary cause of failure in microelectronic devices is void growth and movement in aluminum wire interconnects. In addition to thermal and mechanical stress, void evolution is driven by the electric field in the wire. Two new boundary ele- ment techniques, approximate Green's functions and Galerkin surface derivative evaluation, have been developed to assist in modeling the electromigration prob- lem. These methods improve the efficiency of the simulations, and comparison with finite element calculations shows that they are highly accurate. 1 Introduction As microelectronic devices decrease in size, current densities in the alu- minum wire interconnects necessarily increase. One consequence of this is that electric field induced void growth and movement in these wires has be- come a serious reliability issue (see [1, 2] and references therein). The basi

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