CAM colloquium - February 20

Jon Wilkening
Courant Institute (NYU)

"Grain Boundary Diffusion Due to Stress and Electromigration"

The stress driven grain boundary diffusion problem is a continuum model of mass transport phenomena in microelectronic circuits due to high current densities (electromigration) and gradients in normal stress along grain boundaries. The model involves coupling many different equations and phenomena, and difficulties such as non-locality, stiffness, complex geometry, and singularities in the stress tensor near corners and junctions make the problem difficult to analyze rigorously and simulate numerically. We present a new approach to this problem using techniques from semigroup theory to represent the solution, and study the problem numerically using a singularity capturing least squares finite element method.