Full-chip wire-oriented back-end-of-line TDDB hotspot detection and lifetime analysis

Time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) has become an important cause of failure for inter-metal dielectrics (IMD) in integrated circuits as feature sizes continue to shrink and novel materials are introduced. Although many studies have been conducted to understand the underlying physics of this issue, not enough work has been focused on evaluating TDDB lifetime of practical chip designs in the physical design stage. This paper proposes a full-chip TDDB failure analysis methodology to evaluate lifetime and identify TDDB hotspots in VLSI layouts, which are essentially interconnect wires that have high failure risk due to TDDB. The proposed method features three new techniques compared to existing methods. First, we have developed a partitioning-based scheme to deal with scaling of full-chip analysis by partitioning the full chip layout into small tiles. Second, for each tile, the new method calculates a newly-introduced TDDB failure metric called TDDB Damage for vulnerable wires. Such a wire-oriented TDDB analysis is the first of its kind and is very amenable for physical design as the wires can be easily adjusted or re-routed for TDDB-aware optimization. Third, the new method considers the impact of the non-uniform electric field calculated using the finite element method (FEM), which significantly improves the accuracy of TDDB risk evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed new TDDB analysis method is more accurate than a recently proposed full-chip TDDB analysis method in which electrical field is treated as a constant value. Additionally, the proposed method can analyze a practical VLSI layout in a few hours.