An unfitted finite element method for the numerical approximation of void electromigration (Q2517475)

The electric contact between neighboring devices in integrated circuits is today mostly established by lines of aluminum that can contain small voids which can cause the loss of connections or failure of the circuit, especially because the width of metal interconnects is more and more reduced. Thus, the investigation of the mechanical failures in the lines induced by the motion of the voids is of great interest for the semiconductor industry. The interconnect line is assumed in this paper to be a rectangular solid in a two-dimensional model. The void can move through the conducting line as well as it can change its shape. A free boundary value problem is to solve. The authors consider two different phenomena that cause the motion of the voids: the surface tension and the electric field, summarized as electromigration. They introduce a new front-tracking finite element method for the computation of the electromigration. In contrast to earlier methods, a variational formulation of the bulk-interface coupled system is used and two independent meshes are applied for the finite element approximation of the bulk quantities and the parametric approximation of the moving boundary of the voids with the advantage that a remeshing at each time step is avoided, i.e., the method is unfitted. The moving interface is governed by a fourth-order geometric evolution equation. The electric potential in the bulk satisfies the Laplace equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The authors start with a review of the different numerical algorithms described in the literature for this problem. Then the finite element approximation of the moving boundary and of the bulk region is described. Initially, the interface is assumed to be a closed curve. Later, this case is expanded to multi-component interfaces. The existence and uniqueness of the solutions are proved. Additionally, a semidiscrete continuous-in-time approximation is considered. The results are validated by a number of numerical examples. The finite element approximation is implemented using the C\(^{++}\)-software DUNE. The linear systems of equations are solved using the sparse factorization package UMFPACK and the BiCGSTAB solver including preconditioning because the corresponding matrix is rather ill-conditioned. The mesh generation is based on triangulations. The adaptive mesh strategy results in a mesh that is fine around the interface and more coarse away from it. Topological aspects, such as the merging of two curves and the influence of the mesh configuration, are treated with the help of the package El-Topo.