| AVS 59th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| Electronic Materials and Processing | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session EM-TuA |
| Session: | Materials and Processes for Advanced Interconnects |
| Presenter: | M.T. Nichols, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Authors: | M.T. Nichols, University of Wisconsin-Madison K. Mavrakakis, University of Wisconsin-Madison Q. Lin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center J.L. Shohet, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Silsesquioxane-based photopatternable low-k (PPLK) dielectric materials[1] are promising alternatives to existing low-k dielectrics due to the reduction of BEOL integration complexity. However, processing-induced damage due to reactive species and energetic particles has been previously found to be problematic for low-k organosilicate dielectrics. Thus, for successful integration, the effects of charged-particle bombardment and photon irradiation (particularly in the vacuum ultraviolet range) must be characterized. In order to examine these effects, I-V and C-V characteristics were made on PPLK samples before and after exposure to a variety of argon plasma exposure conditions. Plasma parameters were varied between each exposure so that each sample was subjected to a range of charged particle and photon fluxes. In order to examine the effects of photon irradiation alone, PPLK samples were also exposed to monochromatic synchrotron radiation over energies varying from 5 to 15 eV. It was found that both charged-particle bombardment and photon irradiation have deleterious effects, resulting in increased magnitude of leakage currents and increased flat-band voltage shifts. VUV-exposed samples also exhibited increased leakage currents, but this effect was found to be strongly dependent on photon energy.
This work has been supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation under Contract 2008-KJ-1871 and by the National Science Foundation under Grant CBET-1066231.
[1] Q. Lin, S.T. Chen, A. Nelson, et al., Proc. Of SPIE 7639, 76390J (2010)