nm and the thereby resulting current density increase, electromigration induced failure becomes a more and more challenging issue [7,8].
The material transport induced by electromigration leads to nucleation and growth of voids which consequently causes a large increase in electrical resistance and sometimes complete failure of an interconnect line.
An ultimative hope of integrated circuits designers today is to have a computer program at hand, which predicts the behavior of thin film metalizations under any imaginable condition. Contemporary integrated circuits are often designed using simple and conservative design rules to ensure that the resulting circuits meet certain reliability goals.
There is a lot of theoretical work available for explaining and modeling of the manifold physical phenomena behind electromigration, but only a very small part of it was actually implemented in software tools and tested on real world applications in order to support the work of interconnect layer designers.