Grain Structures & Effects of Stress on Grain Boundaries

Developing higher density microelectronics devices is the impact of the stresses induced by Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) mismatches of the materials used. Here I discuss the use of 3D grain continuum modeling to study grain boundary migration driven by differences in strain energy density. Comsol Multiphysics 4.3a (CM) is being used to compute stresses and strain energy densities in polycrystalline structures caused by temperature changes. We treat each grain as a single crystal with the anisotropic elastic properties of single crystal Cu appropriately rotated to match grain orientation in space.