Prediction of Self-Heating in Short Intra-Block Wires

Ken-ichi SHINKAI, Masanori HASHIMOTO, Takao ONOYE

Summary :

This paper investigates whether the self-heating effect in short intra-block wires will become apparent with technology scaling. These wires seem to have good thermal radiation characteristics, but we validate that the self-heating effect in local signal wires will be greater than that in optimal repeater-inserted global wires. Our numerical experiment shows that the maximum temperature increase from the silicon junction temperature will reach 40.4 in a steady state at a 14-nm process. Our attribution analysis also demonstrates that miniaturizing the area of wire cross-section exacerbates self-heating as well as using low-κ material and increased power dissipation in advanced technologies below 28 nm. It is revealed that the impact of self-heating on performance in local wires is limited, while underestimating the temperature may cause an unexpected reliability failure.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals Vol.E93-A No.3 pp.583-594
• Publication Date: 2010/03/01
• Online ISSN: 1745-1337
• DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E93.A.583
• Type of Manuscript: PAPER
• Category: VLSI Design Technology and CAD

Authors

Ken-ichi SHINKAI
Masanori HASHIMOTO
Takao ONOYE

Keyword

self-heating,  temperature,  interconnect,  local wire,  process scaling