Failure mechanisms

Presented
By
P jaswanth
Electrical overstress

• Failures caused by application of excessive voltages or currents to

components.
• These are of three types ie.,
1.Electro Static Discharge(ESD)-the electrical stress caused by the static
electricity
2.Electromigration-slowwearout mechanism caused by execissive current
densities
3.Antenna Effect-unusual failure mechanism caused by charge
accumulation on gate electrodes during etching or ion implementation
Electro Static Discharge
• Almost any form of friction can generate static electricity.A discharge as little
as 50v will destroy the gate dielectric of a mos transistor.
• Special tests can measure the vulnerability of an IC to ESD.The two most
common models are
1.The human body model(HBM)
2.Machine model(MM)
Another model is charge device model (CDM)-Replacement of MM and more
accurate
Effects of ESD

• Different forms of electrical forms of electrical damage that includes

1.Gate oxide rupture(less than 50v in nano seconds irreversiable)
2.Gate oxide degradation
3.Avalanche induced junction lekage
4.Can vaporize metalization or shatter the bulk silicon
• Sometimes the failure doesn’t occur until the product has been
delivered to customer.Testing can also not find these esd damages
Prevention measures
• Always stored in static shield packing.
• Humidifiers, ionizers and antistatic mats can minimize the building of static
charges around workstation
• Grounded wrist straps and soldiering iron can reduce but don’t entirely
eliminate ESD
• All vulnerable pins must have ESD protection structures connected to their
bond pads.
• some pins are resistible like pins connected to substrate and large diffusions
and power pins connected to multitude of diffusions
• A circuit designer can sometimes eliminate the vulnerable junctions by
rearranging the circuit.
• As ESD is unpredictable,protection is added to all pins
Contd..

• Pins connected to gates or to deposited capacitor electrodes are

required special gate protection structures for these pins.
• But they have a resistance of 500 ohm to 5K ohm and for which pins
conduct a fraction of milliamp cannot use this structures
• A dozen or more protection circuits are often required to satisfy the large
range of voltages and several types of vulnerable devices
Electromigration
• The impact of moving carriers with stationary metal atoms causes a gradual
displacement of metal.
• In aluminum EM occurs at current densities of 5-10^5 A/sqr(cm) but for deep
submicron process it occurs even more at a few milliamps
Effects:
• EM causes metal atoms to gradually move away from the grain
boundries,forming voids between adjacent grains.
• Refractory metals are a class of metals that are extraordinarily resistant to
heat and wear. So these are used for the electromigration effects
• Where the resistance changes due to voids or contact cannot be tolerated,
the designer can insert additional contacts or vias to help reduce the current
density
Preventative measures
• First step is to do process improvements like normally aliminium is routinely
doped with 0.5 to 4% copper to enhance electromigration resistance.
• Copper doped aluminum exhibits five to ten times the current handling
capability of pure aluminium
• The EM resistance of leads can be further improved by using compressively
stressed protective overcoats and prevents voids
• Most manufacturers don’t rely on refractory metal to protect oxide steps
because of the risk of lateral extrusion(one of process in formation of metal)
• Design rules for each processing techniques define a maximum allowed
current per unit width like
1.Typical values are 2ma/um for leads that don’t cross oxide steps Thickness
Composition
1ma/um for leads that cross oxide steps Operating temp of
Metals
Antenna Effect
• The amount of degradation is proportional to total charge that passes through
the gate oxide divided by total gate oxide area.
• Each poly region collects an electrostatic charge proportional to its own area