More Like this

1. Electromigration immortality check considering Joule heating effect of multi-segment wires

   Kavousi, M. ; Chen, L. ; Tan, S. X.-D. ( October 2020 , Proc. IEEE/ACM International Conf. on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD’20))

   Electromigration (EM) is still the most important reliability concern for VLSI systems, especially at the nanometer regime. EM immortality check is an important step for full-chip EM signoff analysis. In this paper, we propose a new electromigration (EM) immortality check method for multi-segment interconnect considering the impacts of Joule heating induced temperature gradient. Temperature gradients from metal Joule heating, called thermal migration, can be a significant force for the metal atomic migrations, and these impacts get more significant as technology scales down. Compared to existing methods, the new method can consider the spatial temperature gradient due to Joule heating for multi-segment wires for the first time. We derive the analytic solution for the resulting steady-state EM-thermal migration stress distribution problem. Then we develop the new temperature-aware voltage-based EM immortality check method considering the multi-segment temperature migration effects, which carries all the benefits of the recently proposed voltage-based EM immortality method for multi-segment interconnects. Numerical results on an IBM power grid and self synthesized power delivery networks show that the proposed temperature-aware EM immortality check method is much more accurate than recently proposed state of the art EM immortality method. 

   more » « less
2. Reliable power grid network design framework considering EM immortalities for multi-segment wires

   Zhou, Han ; Yu, Shuyuan ; Tan, Sheldon ( January 2020 , Proc. Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC’20))

   This paper presents a new power grid network design and optimization technique that considers the new EM immortality constraint due to EM void saturation volume for multi-segment interconnects. Void may grow to its saturation volume without changing the wire resistance significantly. However, this phenomenon was ignored in existing EM-aware optimization methods. By considering this new effect, we can remove more conservativeness in the EM-aware on-chip power grid design. Along with recently proposed nucleation phase immortality constraint for multi-segment wires, we show that both EM immortality constraints can be naturally integrated into the existing programming based power grid optimization framework. To further mitigate the overly conservative problem of existing immortality-constrained optimization methods, we further explore two strategies: first we size up failed wires to meet one of immorality conditions subject to design rules; second, we consider the EM-induced aging effects on power supply networks for a targeted lifetime, which allows some short-lifetime wires to fail and optimizes the rest of the wires. Numerical results on a number of IBM and self-generated power supply networks demonstrate that the new method can reduce more power grid area compared to the existing EM-immortality constrained optimizations. Furthermore, the new method can optimize power grids with nucleated wires, which would not be possible with the existing methods. 

   more » « less
3. EM-GAN: Data-driven fast stress analysis for multi-segment interconnects

   Jin, W. ; Sadiqbatcha, S. ; Sun, Z. ; Zhou, H. ; Tan, S. X.-D. ( October 2020 , Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Computer Design (ICCD),)

   Electromigration (EM) analysis for complicated interconnects requires the solving of partial differential equations, which is expensive. In this paper, we propose a fast transient hydrostatic stress analysis for EM failure assessment for multi-segment interconnects using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our work is inspired by the image synthesis and feature of generative deep neural networks. The stress evaluation of multi-segment interconnects, modeled by partial differential equations, can be viewed as time-varying 2D-images-to-image problem where the input is the multi-segment interconnects topology with current densities and the output is the EM stress distribution in those wire segments at the given aging time. We show that the conditional GAN can be exploited to attend the temporal dynamics for modeling the time-varying dynamic systems like stress evolution over time. The resulting algorithm, called {\it EM-GAN}, can quickly give accurate stress distribution of a general multi-segment wire tree for a given aging time, which is important for full-chip fast EM failure assessment. Our experimental results show that the EM-GAN shows 6.6\% averaged error compared to COMSOL simulation results with orders of magnitude speedup. It also delivers $8.3 \times$ speedup over state-of-the-art analytic based EM analysis solver. 

   more » « less
4. EMGraph: Fast electromigration stress assessment for interconnect trees using graph convolution networks

   Jin, W ; Chen, L ; Sadiqbatch, S ; Peng, S ; Tan, S. X.-D. ( July 2021 , Proc. IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC’21))

   null (Ed.)

   Electromigration (EM) becomes a major concern for VLSI circuits as the technology advances in the nanometer regime. With Korhonen equations, EM assessment for VLSI circuits remains challenged due to the increasing integrated density. VLSI multisegment interconnect trees can be naturally viewed as graphs. Based on this observation, we propose a new graph convolution network (GCN) model, which is called {\it EMGraph} considering both node and edge embedding features, to estimate the transient EM stress of interconnect trees. Compared with recently proposed generative adversarial network (GAN) based stress image-generation method, EMGraph model can learn more transferable knowledge to predict stress distributions on new graphs without retraining via inductive learning. Trained on the large dataset, the model shows less than 1.5% averaged error compared to the ground truth results and is orders of magnitude faster than both COMSOL and state-of-the-art method. It also achieves smaller model size, 4X accuracy and 14X speedup over the GAN-based method. 

   more » « less
5. Truncated Hadamard-Babich Ansatz and Fast Huygens Sweeping Methods for Time-Harmonic Elastic Wave Equations in Inhomogeneous Media in the Asymptotic Regime

   J. Qian, J. Song ( March 2023 , Minimax theory and its applications)

   In some applications, it is reasonable to assume that geodesics (rays) have a consistent orientation so that a time-harmonic elastic wave equation may be viewed as an evolution equation in one of the spatial directions. With such applications in mind, motivated by our recent work [Hadamard- Babich ansatz for point-source elastic wave equations in variable media at high frequencies, Multiscale Model Simul. 19/1 (2021) 46–86], we propose a new truncated Hadamard-Babich ansatz based globally valid asymptotic method, dubbed the fast Huygens sweeping method, for computing Green’s functions of frequency-domain point-source elastic wave equations in inhomogeneous media in the high-frequency asymptotic regime and in the presence of caustics. The first novelty of the fast Huygens sweeping method is that the Huygens-Kirchhoff secondary-source principle is used to integrate many locally valid asymptotic solutions to yield a globally valid asymptotic solution so that caustics can be treated automatically. This yields uniformly accurate solutions both near the source and away from it. The second novelty is that a butterfly algorithm is adapted to accelerate matrix-vector products induced by the Huygens-Kirchhoff integral. The new method enjoys the following desired features: (1) it treats caustics automatically; (2) precomputed asymptotic ingredients can be used to construct Green’s functions of elastic wave equations for many different point sources and for arbitrary frequencies; (3) given a specified number of points per wavelength, it constructs Green’s functions in nearly optimal complexity O(N logN) in terms of the total number of mesh points N, where the prefactor of the complexity depends only on the specified accuracy and is independent of the frequency parameter. Three-dimensional numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance and accuracy of the new method. 

   more » « less