| AVS 64th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Manufacturing Science and Technology Group | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session MS+AS-WeA |
| Session: | Advanced Surface, Interface, and Structural Characterization for High Volume Manufacturing |
| Presenter: | Jean Jordan-Sweet, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center |
| Authors: | J.L. Jordan-Sweet, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center C. Lavoie, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center A.V. Carr, IBM Research, Albany, NY N. Breil, IBM SRDC, East Fishkill; now with Applied Materials Inc. M.M. Frank, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Since the early 1980s IBM has maintained a strong effort in synchrotron-based research. While our involvement with these facilities has been multi-faceted, we have leveraged our impact through two main avenues: the development of unique instrumentation and the nurturing of mutually beneficial collaborations with academia.
I will present examples of how synchrotron-based XRD studies have impacted our heavily materials- and process-centric technologies, preceded by a description of the instrumentation and techniques that were developed and applied in these examples. Much of our success in supporting IBM technology has been based on the use of in-situ XRD, electrical resistance, and optical light scattering measurements during the rapid thermal annealing of thin films or arrays of features. This instrumentation was developed at the NSLS (Brookhaven National Laboratory) [1], and has been redesigned, automated and recently installed at the Canadian Light Source. A second technique that is crucial for understanding the microstructure of thin polycrystalline films on single-crystal substrates is the measurement of texture. With the use of a linear or area detector, many high-resolution pole figures covering a large range of d-spacing can be obtained simultaneously [2]. Understanding and controlling film texture is critical to controlling phase transformations in thin films and to stabilizing and enhancing thermal processing windows during device manufacturing [3].
The first example is a long-term effort to understand the effects of materials and processing on the formation of low-resistance contacts to the gate, source and drain of CMOS devices. It has spanned three materials sets and many generations of chips. The culmination of this knowledge lies in a valuable database containing structure, roughness and resistance information from many thousands of anneals on key samples. With these measurements, IBM was able to extend the manufacturing lifetime of C54-TiSi2, stabilize the NiSi process, and recently resolve a Ni “fang” defect [4] related to the IBM Power8® processor. The second example illustrates how the same techniques are helping us develop advanced memory devices based on ferroelectric hafnium oxide, which are intended to be used for neuromorphic computing.
1] G.B. Stephenson et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 60, 1537, 1989; L.A. Clevenger et al., J. Mater. Res. 10, 2355 (1995); J.L. Jordan-Sweet, IBM J. Res. Develop. 44, 457 (2000).
2] S. Gaudet et al., J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31(2), 021505 (2013).
3] B. DeSchutter et al., Appl. Phys. Rev. 3, 031302, 2016; C. Lavoie et al., ECS Transactions (accepted).
4] N. Breil et al., Microelectron. Eng. 137, 79 (2015).