ATARI: Advanced Thermomigration Analysis for Reliability-Aware Interconnects

Thermomigration (TM) in modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) is a critical phenomenon influencing the reliability and expected lifetime of semiconductor devices. As ICs continue to scale down, thermal gradients and high current densities become more pronounced, leading to significant atom migration within the metallic interconnects. TM is driven by temperature differentials across the chip, causing atoms to move from hot regions to cooler areas. In conjunction, electromigration (EM), driven by high current densities, causes atoms to migrate along the direction of electron flow. The combined effects of these migrations can lead to void formation, increased resistance, and eventual circuit failure. To meet this challenge, we introduce ATARI, a tool that produces dynamic compact EM-TM models (DCETMs) for efficient reliability analysis and can be easily integrated into industrial design workflows. ATARI’s core is equipped with state-of-the-art methodologies for physics-based EM-TM stress analysis, along with model order reduction (MOR) techniques, to efficiently extract the DCETMs. As indicated by the experimental evaluation, ATARI can achieve reduction percentages up to 99.2% and produce highly accurate models.