Erasmus Langer
Siegfried Selberherr
Oskar Baumgartner
Hajdin Ceric
Johann Cervenka
Siddhartha Dhar
Robert Entner
Otmar Ertl
Wolfgang Gös
Klaus-Tibor Grasser
Philipp Hehenberger
René Heinzl
Clemens Heitzinger
Andreas Hössinger
Gerhard Karlowatz
Markus Karner
Hans Kosina
Ling Li
Gregor Meller
Goran Milovanovic
Mihail Nedjalkov
Alexandre Nentchev
Roberto Orio
Vassil Palankovski
Mahdi Pourfath
Philipp Schwaha
Viktor Sverdlov
Oliver Triebl
Stephan Enzo Ungersböck
Martin-Thomas Vasicek
Stanislav Vitanov
Martin Wagner
Paul-Jürgen Wagner
Thomas Windbacher
Robert Wittmann

Alexandre Nentchev
Dipl.-Ing.
nentchev(!at)iue.tuwien.ac.at
Biography:
Alexandre Nentchev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1971. He studied electrical engineering at the Technische Universität Wien, where he received the degree of Diplomingenieur in 2004. He joined the Institute for Microelectronics in April 2004, where he is currently working on his doctoral degree. His scientific interests include numerical and analytical field calculation, three-dimensional interconnect simulation, and software technology.

Three-Dimensional Interconnect Simulation

The three-dimensional interconnect structure in integrated circuits represents a complicated electromagnetic system. It includes many metalization layers with links for more than one million transistors and is characterised by resistance, capacitance and inductance parameters which govern the electric signal behavior and supply. These parameters usually result in functional failure and depend on the spatial distribution of the interconnect lines. It is necessary to investigate the structure of interest during an early stage of the design process, obtaining its parameters and estimating their impact on the entire electric circuit. A changing magnetic field influences the electric current density distribution within an electric conductor. The current is forced to pass through the surface of the conductors, which is known as skin effect. If the current is flowing through several conductors or a wound wire coil, the current density distributes to minimize the area inside and flows to smaller regions. This behavior is termed proximity effect. The combination of skin and proximity effects significantly increases the AC resistance of the conductor compared to its DC resistance. Thus the skin effect and the proximity effect must also be taken into account. To extract the parameters and to consider the skin and proximity effects an electromagnetic analysis is performed. This is actually a problem of solving a set of Maxwell equations in the domain of interest with given boundary conditions. Unfortunately such boundary-value problems can be solved analytically only for a few special cases. In general, for arbitrarily shaped domains, numerical approximation methods like the finite element method (FEM) are used. They give the electric and magnetic field intensity distribution, the electric potential distribution, and the electric current density distribution in the investigated regions, which provide the effects presented above and are used for the calculation of further parameters. Thereby scalar and vector shape functions are used.


The magnetic field intensity distribution of an on-chip inductor.


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