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Electromigration for microarchitects

Published: 05 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Degradation of devices has become a major issue for processor design due to continuous device shrinkage and current density increase. Transistors and wires suffer high stress, and failures may appear in the field. In particular, wires degrade mainly due to electromigration when driving current. Techniques to mitigate electromigration to some extent have been proposed from the circuit point of view, but much effort is still required from the microarchitecture side to enable wire scaling in future technologies.
This survey brings to the microarchitecture community a comprehensive study of the causes and implications of electromigration in digital circuits and describes the challenges that must be faced to mitigate electromigration by means of microarchitectural solutions.

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys
ACM Computing Surveys  Volume 42, Issue 2
February 2010
134 pages
ISSN:0360-0300
EISSN:1557-7341
DOI:10.1145/1667062
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 March 2010
Accepted: 01 October 2008
Revised: 01 September 2008
Received: 01 April 2007
Published in CSUR Volume 42, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Electromigration
  2. buses
  3. degradation
  4. wires

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  • (2021)Worst-Case Energy Consumption: A New Challenge for Battery-Powered Critical DevicesIEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing10.1109/TSUSC.2019.29431426:3(522-530)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
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  • (2018)Thermoreflectance imaging of electromigration evolution in asymmetric aluminum constrictionsJournal of Applied Physics10.1063/1.5005938123:3Online publication date: 19-Jan-2018
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