Electromigration in metal lines has re-emerged as a significant concern in modern VLSI circuits. The higher levels of temperature and the large number of EM checking strategies, have led to a situation where trying to guarantee EM reliability often leads to conservative designs that may not meet the area or performance specs. Due to their mostly-unidirectional currents, the problem is most significant in power grids. Thus, this work is aimed at reducing the pessimism in EM prediction. There are two sources for the pessimism: the use of the series model for EM checking, and the pessimistic assumptions about chip workload. Therefore, we propose an EM checking framework that allows users to specify conditions-of-use type constraints to capture realistic chip workload, and which includes the use of a novel mesh model for EM prediction in the grid, instead of the traditional series model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/42835 |
| Date | 22 November 2013 |
| Creators | Fawaz, Mohammad |
| Contributors | Najm, Farid N. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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