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    Electronics Friday Sessions
       Session EL-FrM

Invited Paper EL-FrM1
Copper Alloys for Interconnections in Microelectronics

Friday, November 2, 2001, 8:20 am, Room 124

Session: ULSI Metallization & Interconnects
Presenter: J.M.E. Harper, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Authors: J.M.E. Harper, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
C.K. Hu, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
K. Barmak, Carnegie Mellon University
Correspondent: Click to Email
We review the attributes of copper alloys which are suitable for consideration in silicon chip interconnections. Many properties of copper improve with the addition of alloying elements, including corrosion protection, electromigration resistance and mechanical stability. However, these gains must be balanced against the inevitable increase in resistivity caused by adding impurity atoms. Alloying elements will be classified into three types of immiscible systems, plus systems in which Cu compounds form. We focus on alloy systems in which the resistivity can be lowered to that of almost pure Cu within a maximum processing temperature of about 400 @supero@C. In addition, the constraints of sub-250 nm dimensions on alloy precipitation and microstructure evolution will be summarized. It will be shown that there are promising strategies for incorporating alloys into copper interconnections.