On wires at low electron densities

When analyzing reliability, wires have in most cases been ignored, with gates taking the lion's share, and devices being considered only once in a while. With scaling, this "only-computations-fail" approach is not going to be accurate enough as wires will also start to err. Trying to do justice to communication (wires), this paper details a statistical failure analysis of wires following on the few papers which have made wires' reliability their concern. We will use a classical particle-like probabilistic approach to enhance on the accuracy of wires' length-dependent probabilities of failure due to the discreetness of charge. Covering some of the intrinsic noises, such an approach leads to "lower bound"-like wire reliability estimates, as ignoring other intrinsic noises, as well as extrinsic noises, variations, and defects. These results should have implications for design strategies of multi-/many-cores and networks-on-chip, as well as for forward-looking investigations on emerging nano-architectures.