Electromigration-induced failure and reliability of metallizations in integrated circuits

It is shown that electromigration-induced open-circuit failures of completely passivated polycrystalline metallizations in integrated circuits under normal operating conditions can be controlled by lattice diffusion rather than grain-boundary diffusion. This is due to the bottleneck effect associated with low lattice diffusivity, which drastically reduces the flux of matter leaving the grain-boundary network during void growth. The estimated typical failure times are orders of magnitude larger than those predicted by models that completely neglect lattice diffusion.