Prediction of Self-Heating in Short Intra-Block Wires

This paper investigates whether the self-heating effect in short intra-block wires will become apparent with technology scaling. These wires seem to have good thermal radiation characteristics, but we validate that the self-heating effect in local signal wires will be greater than that in optimal repeater-inserted global wires. Our numerical experiment shows that the maximum temperature increase from the silicon junction temperature will reach 40.4◦C in a steady state at a 14-nm process. Our attribution analysis also demonstrates that miniaturizing the area of wire cross-section exacerbates self-heating as well as using low-κ material and increased power dissipation in advanced technologies below 28 nm. It is revealed that the impact of self-heating on performance in local wires is limited, while underestimating the temperature may cause an unexpected reliability failure. key words: self-heating, temperature, interconnect, local wire, process scaling