Voltage transients in electromigration noise measurement data

The 1/f(2) noise measurement technique used for determination of electromigration lifetime has had only limited practical success. The correlation of noise magnitude to lifetime is high but the results are inconsistent. In this paper the source of the inconsistent results is identified and demonstrated. The presence of voltage transients in noise data, caused by abrupt changes of resistance in a thin-him test structure, is shown to be the primary source of 1/f(2) noise in the 1-10 Hz frequency range. The transients do not appear consistently in the data and are strongly affected by typical data handling techniques such as windowing. The combination of these factors explains the inconsistent results obtained when using the 1/f(2) noise measurement technique. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.