EMSpice 2.1: A Coupled EM and IR Drop Analysis Tool with Joule Heating and Thermal Map Integration for VLSI Reliability

Abstract

Electromigration (EM) remains a critical reliability concern in current and future copper-based VLSI circuits. As technology scales down, EM-induced IR drop becomes increasingly severe. While several EM-aware IR drop analysis tools have been proposed, few incorporate the real impact of temperature distribution on both EM and IR drop effects. In this work, we introduce EMSpice 2.1, an enhanced tool built upon the existing coupled IR-EM analysis framework, EMSpice 2.0, for EM-aware IR drop analysis. For the first time, EMSpice 2.1 uniquely integrates Joule heating effects and practical thermal maps derived from actual chip conditions. Additionally, it features improved interoperability with commercial EDA tools, facilitating more comprehensive EM and IR drop sign-off analysis. Our findings demonstrate that specific hotspot patterns significantly impact the lifetime of interconnects and overall chip reliability due to EM failures. Furthermore, our tool exhibits strong agreement with industry-standard tools such as COMSOL, achieving a speedup of over 200 times while maintaining high accuracy.