Reliability and performance tradeoffs in the design of on-chip power delivery and interconnects

The performance of CMOS integrated circuits has always been, and continues to be, limited by reliability considerations. Performance, reliability and cost are traded off through voltage and temperature specifications. The temperature acceleration of breakdown in oxides is increasing with decreasing thickness, current densities are increasing further stressing electromigration, inductive noise effects are becoming more significant while soft error susceptibility is increasing. In addition to all of these deleterious effects, oxide wear out has become a major factor in determining lifetime of very thin oxides. The design and validations issues associated with oxide wear out failure mechanisms are discussed.