Slurry Design for Chemical Mechanical Polishing

Abstract

Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) process is widely used in the microelectronics industry for planarization of metal and dielectric layers to achieve multi-layer metallization. For an effective polishing, it is necessary to minimize the surface defects while attaining a good planarity with optimal material removal rate. These requirements can be met by controlling the chemical and mechanical interactions during the polishing process, or in other words, by engineering the slurry chemistry, particulate properties and stability. This paper reviews the impact of chemical, inter-particle and pad-particle-substrate interactions on CMP performance. It is shown that for consistently high performing slurries, stability of abrasive particles must be achieved under the dynamic processing conditions by providing sufficient pad-particle-wafer interactions.

Keywords

• chemical mechanical polishing (cmp)
• chemically altered thin films
• particle size
• particle size distribution
• slurry stability
• interaction forces