Metal sputter deposition processes for semiconductor manufacturing are characterized by a decrease in deposition rate from run to run as the sputter target degrades. The goal is to maintain a desired deposition thickness from wafer to wafer and lot to lot. Run by run (RbR) model-based process control (MBPC) has been applied to metal sputter deposition processes at Texas Instruments. RbR MBPC, b...

Sputter deposition is a widely used technique to deposit thin films on substrates. The technique is based upon ion bombardment of a source material, the target. Ion bombardment results in a vapor due to a purely physical process, i.e. the sputtering of the target material. Hence, this technique is part of the class of physical vapor deposition techniques, which includes, for example, thermal ev...

Ballistic electron emission microscopy has been used to study thin aluminum oxide tunnel junction barriers formed both by magnetron sputter deposition and thermal evaporation. We have found that the barriers made by oxidation of evaporated Al become fully formed at a significantly thinner mean deposited thickness ~;6 Å! than junctions made by sputter deposition. The effective barrier height of ...

Thin-film growth by sputter deposition is a manufacturing process that is well suited for study by particle simulation methods. The authors report on the development of a high performance, parallel, molecular-dynamics software package that simulates atomic metal systems under sputter deposition conditions. The package combines advanced techniques for parallel molecular dynamics with specialized...

The filling of deep vias and trenches with metal for interconnect layers in microelectronic devices requires anisotropic deposition techniques to avoid formation of voids. Ionized metal physical vapor deposition ~IMPVD! is a process which is being developed to address this need. In IMPVD, a magnetron sputter deposition source is augmented with a secondary plasma source with the goal of ionizing...

Experiments are described towards optimizing tantalum silicide (TaSi 2 ) interconnect metal film sputter-deposition and annealing in a manner compatible with the NASA Glenn two-layer silicon carbide (SiC) JFET-R IC process flow. Films deposited on 100 mm diameter wafers were investigated over range of thickness, sputter deposition, post-deposition anneal conditions. An optimized that achieved T...

In vitro dissolution behaviors of CaTiO3 thin films deposited with ion beam assisted deposition (IBAD) and sputter-deposition techniques were investigated using Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) and Auger electron spectroscopy (AES). In vitro test was carried out by immersion in a simulated body fluid at 37 C for 5, 24, and 888 h. The dissolution of titanium ions from CaTiO3 film was...

Epitaxial magnetic multilayers are grown in a new deposition system that can be coupled to a variety of synchrotron-based spectroscopic tools at the SRC, such as angle-resolved photoemission with a Scienta analyzer, spin-polarized photoemission, and resonant magnetic x-ray scattering. It is possible to deposit materials by sputter-deposition and by evaporation in the same system, thereby allowi...