Comments on electromigration analysis methods

Failures caused by the electromigration (EM) are becoming a primary reliability concern of integrated circuits and electronics packaging designers and manufacturers. In the foreseeable future, the trend of greater scale integration and further miniaturization in the microelectronics industry is expected to continue and this will make the metallization in electronics devices more susceptible to EM failures. In the last few decades, various methods and techniques have been developed and used in EM analysis and EM-aware designs, and numerical modeling in particular has become a very important tool that makes it easier to accurately understand and predict the behavior of EM under realistic environmental conditions. In this paper, a review has been carried out on EM analysis techniques and models ranging from early empirical models to recent numerical simulation method capable of solving three-dimensional EM problems.