3 ms·

Is this caused by quantum tunneling?

• nrdgrrrl 2y ago
  [dead]
• tedsanders 2y ago
  No. Imagine sledding down hillside covered in gravel. Friction imparts momentum from your sled to the gravel, causing a few pieces to slide forward with each ride down the hill. With a thin enough layer of gravel, and with enough ride down the hill, you can end up with bare patches with no gravel. In this loose analogy, the gravel is atoms in wire. The sled is an electrical impulse. Maybe there's some tunneling that takes place when the gravel moves from one site to another, but I'm not sure. (I once had a job offer from Intel to work on electromigration in next gen chips, but didn't take it, so I don't know much beyond the basics.)
  • beagle3 2y ago
    I vaguely remember this being discussed in a semiconductor course at uni (back in 1996 or so) - it was already an issue at the time in the smallest processes, and IIRC the prevailing approach then was to make sure that current flows both ways in the specific connections that were prone to electromigration - thus replenishing the supply.
    • badcppdev 2y ago
      If the erosion is a statistical process then I assume that having the current flow both ways just slows down the erosion by some factor. I assume you could estimated it using some variant of the random walk statistical model.
    • smaddox 2y ago
      It was a major issue with aluminum interconnects. It was primarily addressed by switching to a different metal that exhibits less electromigration, namely copper. But you have to be careful putting copper in a silicon fab, because if it gets into the silicon channel, it kills device performance (copper doping induces a deep trap in silicon).
  • deleted 2y ago
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