A Fast Semi-Analytical Approach for Transient Electromigration Analysis of Interconnect Trees Using Matrix Exponential

• Main Authors: Stoikos, Pavlos, Floros, George, Garyfallou, Dimitrios, Evmorfopoulos, Nestor, Stamoulis, George
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Design automation; Electromigration; Hardware > Integrated circuits > Interconnect > Metallic interconnect; Hardware > Robustness > Hardware reliability > Aging of circuits and systems; Industries; Integrated circuit interconnections; Integrated circuit technology; Krylov subspace; Mathematical models; Matrix exponential method; Power grids
• ISSN: 2153-697X
• DOI: 10.1145/3566097.3567909

As integrated circuit technologies are moving to smaller technology nodes, Electromigration (EM) has become one of the most challenging problems facing the EDA industry. While numerical approaches have been widely deployed since they can handle complicated interconnect structures, they tend to be much slower than analytical approaches. In this paper, we present a fast semi-analytical approach, based on the matrix exponential, for the solution of Korhonen's stress equation at discrete spatial points of interconnect trees, which enables the analytical calculation of EM stress at any time and point independently. The proposed approach is combined with the extended Krylov subspace method to accurately simulate large EM models and accelerate the calculation of the final solution. Experimental evaluation on OpenROAD benchmarks demonstrates that our method achieves 0.5% average relative error over the COMSOL industrial tool while being up to three orders of magnitude faster.