GOALI: A Multidisciplinary Industry-University Partnership to Assess the Processes Controlling Chemical-Mechanical Polishing

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Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) is a technology of tremendous interest to the semiconductor manufacturing community. It transforms wafers with varying surface topography into wafers with locally and globally flat surfaces. During CMP, a wafer is pressed face-down against a rotating polishing pad that is covered with an aqueous suspension of abrasive particles (slurry). Chemical and materials engineering faculty at Arizona State University will work with industry engineers from Motorola, Rodel, and SpeedFam-IPEC to develop fundamental descriptions of key chemical and mechanical polishing phenomena, and will combine these descriptions into unified, experimentally validated models of CMP processes. Polishing of SiO2 and Cu surfaces will be studied using these models. Molecular dynamic simulations of the interactions between slurry particles and the wafer surfaces will be performed, as well as the reactions that occur on and within thin films during CMP. Surface spectroscopy studies will be performed to assess the rates of surface passivation and dissolution reactions occurring during CMP, and the rate of slurry penetration into the wafer surfaces will be assessed. These fundamental chemical and physical descriptions will be combined with existing finite element removal rate models that are based on stress effects to produce unified CMP process models. The project is expected to provide the identification and quantification of the physical and chemical phenomena of CMP and expression of these results in fundamental models. The models will be useful to industry in the optimization and development of polishing protocols for semiconductor wafers.