1. Wiring
The wiring of an integrated circuit can take up to 80 % of the chip's surface, that's why techniques habe been developed to stack the wiring on top of the wafer in multiple layers. The amount of wires with only one additional layer can be reduced about 30 %.
Between the wires, isolation layers are deposited, the metal layers are connected through vertical interconnect accesses (via). In today's microchips there are seven or more layers integrated. Edges and steps have to be rounded since the conformity of the metallization layers is not very good. This leads to bottlenecks in which current densities are increased so that electromigration occurs. To remove edges and steps there are several possibilities for planarization.