Accelerating Physics-Based Electromigration Analysis via Rational Krylov Subspaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces two rational Krylov subspace methods for fast, accurate electromigration stress analysis in VLSI interconnects, significantly reducing computational cost while maintaining high precision.

Contribution

It develops novel frequency- and time-domain rational Krylov techniques with automatic shift time optimization for efficient EM analysis, outperforming traditional methods.

Findings

Achieves 20-500x speedup over finite-difference methods.

Maintains sub-0.1% error in key metrics with only 4-6 Krylov orders.

Requires significantly fewer Krylov orders than standard methods.

Abstract

Electromigration (EM) induced stress evolution is a major reliability challenge in nanometer-scale VLSI interconnects. Accurate EM analysis requires solving stress-governing partial differential equations over large interconnect trees, which is computationally expensive using conventional finite-difference methods. This work proposes two fast EM stress analysis techniques based on rational Krylov subspace reduction. Unlike traditional Krylov methods that expand around zero frequency, rational Krylov methods enable expansion at selected time constants, aligning directly with metrics such as nucleation and steady-state times and producing compact reduced models with minimal accuracy loss. Two complementary frameworks are developed: a frequency-domain extended rational Krylov method, ExtRaKrylovEM, and a time-domain rational Krylov exponential integration method, EiRaKrylovEM. We show that the accuracy of both methods depends strongly on the choice of expansion point, or shift time, and demonstrate that effective shift times are typically close to times of interest such as nucleation or post-void steady state. Based on this observation, a coordinate descent optimization strategy is introduced to automatically determine optimal reduction orders and shift times for both nucleation and post-void phases. Experimental results on synthesized structures and industry-scale power grids show that the proposed methods achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency and accuracy over finite-difference solutions. Using only 4 to 6 Krylov orders, the methods achieve sub-0.1 percent error in nucleation time and resistance change predictions while delivering 20 to 500 times speedup. In contrast, standard extended Krylov methods require more than 50 orders and still incur 10 to 20 percent nucleation time error, limiting their practicality for EM-aware optimization and stochastic EM analysis.