Anode Effects in Electroplated Cu Film

Mechanism for Cu void defect on various electroplated film conditions

This study observes that copper (Cu) films deposited by high current densities or in an aged electrolyte easily generate void defects after chemical mechanical polishing (CMP). The (111)/(200) ratio and the impurity amount of an electroplated Cu film are found to have strong correlation with the formation of void defects. Furthermore, pulse-reverse waveform plating following direct current plat...

Effect of plating current density and annealing on impurities in electroplated Cu film

Electrochemical Effects in Electroplated

Hybrid microcircuit packages are multicomponent electronics devices used in high tech military equipment. They also find application in medical devices for implant in humans to abort the attack of many life threatening illnesses. These are electroplated with limited thicknesses of nickel (1.25 8.75pm) and gold (1.25 5.6pm). In addition there are post plate baking and steam aging requirements as...

Residual Stress and Microstructure of Electroplated Cu Film on Different Barrier Layers

Copper films of different thicknesses between 0.2 and 2 microns were electroplated on adhesion-promoting TiW and Ta barrier layers on <100> single crystal 6-inch silicon wafers. The residual stress was measured after each processing step using a wafer curvature technique employing Stoney’s equation. Large gradients in the stress distributions were found across each wafer. Controlled Cu grain gr...

Isothermal stress relaxation in electroplated Cu films. II. Kinetic modeling

In Part I we reported experimental results obtained from isothermal stress relaxation tests of electroplated Cu thin films with and without a passivation layer and deduced grain-boundary and interface diffusivities based on a kinetic model. Here in Part II we describe the detail of the model, which is based on coupling of grain-boundary diffusion with surface diffusion for unpassivated films an...