Electromigration reliability of Cu interconnects and the impact of low-k dielectrics

Author

Ho, P.S. ; Lee, K.-D. ; Ogawa, E.T. ; Lu, X. ; Matsuhashi, H.

Author_Institution

Microelectron. Res. Center, Texas Univ., Austin, TX, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

7-11 July 2003

Firstpage

59

Lastpage

62

Abstract

Electromigration (EM) reliability in Cu dual-damascene structures integrated with oxide and low-k ILD was investigated using a statistical approach. This approach is efficient in addressing early failures using multi-link structures to sample very large number of interconnect elements. In this paper, we summarize results first on early failures of Cu/oxide structures, then EM characteristics of Cu/low-k structures are discussed and compared with Cu/oxide structures. The integration of low-k ILD was found to degrade EM performance and to induce a new failure mechanism. These results can be attributed to the thermomechanical properties of the low-k ILD and its implication on EM reliability will be discussed.

Keywords

copper; dielectric materials; electromigration; failure analysis; integrated circuit interconnections; integrated circuit reliability; Cu; Cu interconnects; Cu/oxide structures; dielectrics; electromigration reliability; failures; thermomechanical properties; Cathodes; Degradation; Dielectric devices; Electromigration; Failure analysis; Instruments; Laboratories; Microelectronics; Testing; Thermomechanical processes;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits, 2003. IPFA 2003. Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on the

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7722-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPFA.2003.1222739

Filename

1222739