COMPUTER SIMULATION OF VOID GROWTH DYNAMICS UNDER THE ACTION OF ELECTROMIGRATION AND CAPILLARY FORCES IN NARROW THIN INTERCONNECTS

Tarik O. OGURTANI and Ersin Emre OREN
Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara 06531, Turkey

In these studies a comprehensive picture of void dynamics in connection with the critical morphological evolution has been thoroughly anticipated in order to understand main reasons as well as the conditions under which premature failure of metallic thin interconnects occurs. Our mathematical model on the mass flow and accumulation on void surfaces, under the action of applied electrostatic and elastostatic force fields, and capillary effects, follows a novel irreversible but discrete thermodynamic formulation of interphases and surfaces developed by the senior author in connection with the triple junction singularities as well as ordinary points along the interfaces. This formalism also takes into account rather natural way the mass transfer process (the void growth), between bulk phase and the void region in multi-component systems, in terms of the normalized local values of Gibbs free energy of transformation with respect to the specific surface Gibbs free energy, in addition to the contribution due to local curvature of the advancing reaction front, rather rigorously.