Impact of FEOL cross-heating on the thermal performance of advanced BEOL

In this paper we present a modeling study to investigate the Joule heating effect on an advanced metallization scheme taking into account the heat dissipated by the logic cell. To account on the heat exchange between the front end of line (FEOL) and back end of line (BEOL) a methodology has been developed based on their eigenmode calculated individually. This methodology was applied and the thermal performance of the BEOL has been accessed. Different scenarios that correspond to different IC’s applications have been considered and the results of temperature increase in the BEOL showed to be very dependent on the application. Results showed that for an IC package used for a mobile application 90 percent of the temperature increase in the BEOL comes from FEOL. The cooling solution showed to decrease to 65 percent the effect of the heat exchange. Packages normally used for high power application with a forced cooling solution showed to decrease the effect of the thermal coupling to 16 percent.