Advances in Engineering Advances in Engineering features breaking research judged by Advances in Engineering advisory team to be of key importance in the Engineering field. Papers are selected from over 10,000 published each week from most peer reviewed journals.
Significance Statement
Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) is well known technology for global planarization of a wafer. However, its role is limited not only to step height reduction with device gate length shrinking close to 14nm. Furthermore, Chemical Mechanical Polishing -induced defects are critical yield detractors. For yield enhancement and transistor performance, controlling and minimizing post Chemical Mechanical Polishing defect draws great attention and becomes one of the hottest process issues. Most Chemical Mechanical Polishing tools accept brush scrubber cleaning in the in-situ cleaning module due to its physical cleaning ability and many literatures have reported particle removal efficiency and proposed optimized brush cleaning conditions. However, in reality, brush itself originates a lot of contamination and acts as a particle source. This paper showed clear evidence of nanoparticle contamination effect and process conditions to optimize realistic post Chemical Mechanical Polishing in-situ cleaning process for sub 14nm device manufacturing.
Journal Reference
Hong Jin Kim1, Girish Bohra2, Hyucksoo Yang2, Si-Gyung Ahn1, Liqiao Qin1, Dinesh Koli1. Microelectronic Engineering, Volume 136, 2015, Pages 36-41.
[expand title=”Show Affiliations”]- Advanced Module Engineering (AME), GLOBALFOUNDRIES, 400 Stone Break Road Extension, Malta, NY 12020, USA.
- Technology Development Yield Enhancement (TDYE), GLOBALFOUNDRIES, 400 Stone Break Road Extension, Malta, NY 12020, USA.
Abstract
Scaling of gate lengths has led to significant improvement in semiconductor device performance. However, fabrication complexities have also increased and surface defects control becomes very critical for yield enhancement. In particular, chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process is considered as one of the dirtiest processes to wafer surface contamination. And brush scrubber is the most effective method for post Chemical Mechanical Polishing in situ cleaning. Many literatures have reported brush scrubber mechanism and proposed particle removal efficiency based on remaining particles at post brush scrubber cleaning. However, concerns associated with brush to wafer surface contamination have not been addressed properly although real manufacturing has a lot of issues on that effect. This paper discuss cross contamination at brush scrubber process and emphasize that optimum cleaning should consider brush cross contamination in addition to brush particle removal efficiency.
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