AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition
    Electronic Materials and Processing Tuesday Sessions
       Session EM-TuP

Paper EM-TuP21
Band-Gap Measurements of Low-K Porous Organosilicate Dielectrics using Vacuum Ultraviolet Irradiation

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 6:30 pm, Room Hall 3

Session: Electronic Materials and Processing Poster Session
Presenter: Joshua Blatz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Authors: H. Zheng, University of Wisconsin-Madison
J. Blatz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
S.W. King, Intel Corporation
E. Ryan, GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Y. Nishi, Stanford University
J.L. Shohet, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Correspondent: Click to Email
Porous low-k organosilicate dielectrics are of great interest in semiconductor fabrication due to their low-k properties and understanding their behavior during vacuum ultraviolet irradiation is important for their utilization in industry. Experimental measurements of the band-gap of low-k organosilicate dielectrics are presented in this work. Specifically, vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) synchrotron photoemission spectroscopy was used to investigate the effect of VUV radiation on porous organosilicate (SiCOH) dielectrics during processing. By comparing photoemission spectroscopic data before and after VUV exposure, VUV irradiation with photon energies less than 9.0 eV was found to be beneficial in depleting accumulated charge in SiCOH films while VUV photons with higher energies did not have this effect. Moreover, VUV irradiation with 8.9 eV photons depletes the most charge. This energy serves as a reference point from which other properties of the materials such as the location and presence of defect states could be detected and band-gap energy of SiCOH could be achieved finally. [1] In addition, a comparison of band-gap measurements of low-k dielectrics made with other techniques, such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) [2] is presented.

This work was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation under Contract 2012-KJ-2359 and by the National Science Foundation under Grant CBET-1066231.

[1] H. Zheng, S. W. King, V. Ryan, Y. Nishi and J. L. Shohet, “Bandgap measurements of low-k porous organosilicate dielectrics using vacuum ultraviolet irradiation”, Appl. Phys. 104, 062904 (2014).

[2] M. T. Nichols, W. Li, D. Pei, G. A. Antonelli, Q. Lin, S. Banna, Y. Nishi and J. L. Shohet, “Measurement of Bandgap Energies in low-k organosilicates”, J. Appl. Phys. 115, 094105 (2014).