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We report results of a systematic theoretical analysis of the electromigration driven morphological evolution of voids in metallic thin films based on self-consistent numerical simulations according to a fully nonlinear surface transport model that accounts for surface diffusional anisotropy. The analysis focuses on film planes with high symmetry of surface diffusional anisotropy. The simulations indicate that under very low anisotropy strengths, there is indeed the possibility of current driven wave propagation on the void surface. Specifically, surface waves appear prior to film failure over a broad range of electric field strengths: from very weak to quite strong. These interesting phenomena appear only at negative misorientation angles between the electric field direction and fast directions of surface diffusion for very low anisotropy strengths. However, for a slight increase in the anisotropy strength, current-induced wave propagation is observed also in the case of positive misorientation angles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A technique for accelerating inexact Newton schemes is presented for the solution of nonlinear systems of algebraic equations that is based on the so-called recursive projection method (RPM) and is built as a computational shell around a Newton/Krylov code. The method acts directly on the ‘outer’ Newton iteration and does not act as a preconditioner to accelerate the solution of the linear system, i.e. the ‘inner’ Krylov iteration. The advantage of this approach is that it reduces the number of Newton iterations that are needed for convergence while still performing inexpensive Krylov iterations for the solution of the linear system at each Newton step. The method can be applied in conjunction with a preconditioned or unpreconditioned Krylov iterative solver, serial or parallel, of any discretized physical model. In addition, it enables the extraction of the dominant eigenspace with the help of a low-dimensional Jacobian matrix that is formulated in the course of the iterations making the solution of a large-scale eigenproblem, unnecessary. The proposed approach is applied on the 2-d Bratu problem and the lid-driven cavity problem. The equations are discretized with the Galerkin/finite element method and the resulting nonlinear algebraic equation set is solved by Newton''s method. At each Newton step the restarted generalized minimum residual or GMRES(m) procedure is implemented for the solution of the resulting linear equation set. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]