Practice 

Ember™ can be included in your electromigration flow as easily as this (Ember™-specific parts are in bold):

  • Calibrate Ember™'s technology file to your foundry's rms current density rules (one time).
  • Extract the netlist with detailed parasitics into the standard spef format.
  • Either
    • Compute rms current on the spef resistors using your preferred EMR methodology and annotate the values on the spef resistors,  
    • Compute dc current in the devices and annotate the spef device terminals with the values (Ember™ will perform dc current analysis on the interconnect network), or
    • Provide Ember™'s heuristic rms current analysis method with clock frequency and optional activity factors for each net.
  • Run Ember™ with the spef file as input.
  • Ember™ iterates until coupled interconnect temperatures have converged, then returns average and maximum temperatures on each resistor.

A digital block with resistor rms currents from Spice circuit simulation...

An analogue block with dc resistor currents computed by Ember™, based on device terminal currents from circuit simulation...

A single cell with heuristic current estimate...