Mechanistic study on interlayer dielectric breakdown in integrated circuits

Copper transport in damascene interconnect structures is an important reliability issue leading to accelerated interlayer dielectric (ILD) breakdown. It is unclear that whether the experimentally determined leakage current is mainly of an ionic nature or an electronic nature due to the difficulties and complications in separating these two components. However, enough thermodynamic data are available to calculate the copper ionic current from basic transport equations and independently determined parameter values. The calculated ionic current is compared with the experimentally determined total current. We have found that the electronic current rather than the ionic current is the major component in the leakage current.