Experimental study of electromigration in bicrystal aluminum lines

Abstract
We report a new experimental technique for the study of electromigration in Al lines containing controlled, single, identical grain boundaries with boundary planes perpendicular to the plane of the substrates. We show that failure times of these lines are lognormally distributed; that the median time to failure depends more strongly on the boundary orientations than the types of grain boundaries; that the deviation in the time to failure has a large component not dependent on microstructure; and that both interfacial diffusion and grain boundary diffusion appear to contribute to failure in bicrystal lines, and likely in bamboo and near-bamboo lines.