Development of modeling to investigate polyurethane pad hardness in chemical mechanical planarization/polishing (CMP) process

Abstract In chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) for IC fabrication, porous pads are critical achieving extremely consistent throughput in CMP process. The pad hardness, porosity of pad, and pore sizes the thermoplastic polyurethanes foam fabrication procedure determine properties pads. This paper aims to develop a methodology modeling macro micro hardness. IC1000 has been analyzed with developed image processing method pores size. addition, nano-indentation tests used physical micro-solid components. For hardness analysis, five different three-dimensional representative volume elements (RVE) have investigated using random sequential adsorption technique. Furthermore, simulation RVE models completed finite element method. Results this study not only achieves as 3% errors compared micro-indentation test, but also complete three dimensional RVE.