Electromigration in alloys

Further analysis, which is not yet complete, has indicated that dre flow of current should be described as having two effects. The first, the purely 

A number of attempts have been made to quairtify this model by means of fundamental quantum-mechanical calculations on the free electron transport in metals and alloys, but at dre present time, the qualitative data presented in Table 5.1 will suffice to indicate the U eirds. 

In substitutional metallic solid solutions and in liquid alloys the experimental data have been described by Epstein and Paskin (1967) in terms of a predominant frictional force which leads to the accumulation of one species towards the anode. The relative movement of metallic ion cores in an alloy phase is related to the scattering cross-section for the conduction electrons, which in turn can be correlated with the relative resistance of the pure metals. Thus iron, which has a higher specific resistance than copper, will accumulate towards the anode in a Cu-Fe alloy. Similarly in a germanium-lithium alloy, the solute lithium atoms accumulate towards the cathode. In liquid alloys the same qualitative effect is observed, thus magnesium accumulates near the cathode in solution in bismuth, while uranium, which is in a higher Group of the Periodic Table than bismuth, accumulated near the anode in the same solvent. 

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Defect configurations in dilute alloys, studied up to now in the framework of multiple scattering theory, are such that a one-to-one correspondence exists between the atoms in the alloy and the reference system, the latter system regularly being the unperturbed host system. This one-to-one correspondence does not apply to the defect studied in substitutional electromigration, in which a host atom or an impurity can move to a neighbouring vacancy. 

To mitigate the problem, a diffusion barrier is incorporated between the aluminum and the silicon (see Sec. 5 below). It is also possible to replace aluminum by alloys of aluminum and copper or aluminum and silicon, which have less tendency to electromigration. These alloys are usually deposited by bias sputtering. However, they offer only a temporary solution as electromigration will still occur as greater densities of circuit elements are introduced. It was recently determined that improvements in the deposition of aluminum by MOCVD at low temperature with a dimethyl aluminum hydride precursor may reduce the problem.bl... 

It will be shown that a more elegant and more easily applicable solution of the problem is given by choosing another reference system. Both the dilute alloy and the unperturbed host can be described with respect to a common reference system, which consists of the unperturbed part of the alloy system and for obvious reasons is called void system. This void system allows for a single-site evaluation of the matrix element describing the wind force in electromigration and the t-matrix element required for the calculation of the residual resistivity due to a saddle-point defect. 

The competitor to YBaCuO in this application is copper, which has a resistivity at 77 K of 0.24 /x 2cm, compared to a value at 300 K of 1.7 p2cm< In fact at room temperature, copper alloys with even higher resisitivity are used to reduce electromigration, which is practically eliminated at the lower temperatures. Thus copper offers a reduction in resistance of more than a factor of 6 at 77 K. 

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