SBIR Phase I: Microfabricated Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) Pad Conditioners with Controlled Diamond Geometrical Protrusions

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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop micro-fabricated diamond Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) pad conditioners as a replacement of traditional grit-based conditioners for semiconductor and optical polishing. This project will utilize Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) based ultrananocrystalline diamond technologies to create a narrowly size-distributed and shape-controlled array of protrusions to act as abrasive grit. The resulting monolithic abrasive surface will be able to withstand wear and corrosion in the presence of CMP slurries without loss of abrasive structures. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the potential to provide new CMP pad conditioners to meet the required precision of CMP process for the 32 nanometer node semiconductor technologies and beyond. In the CMP process, rotating pads combined with chemically-active slurries are used to polish surfaces. For sustained performance, the pads must be periodically re-conditioned using abrasive pad conditioners. As wafer-level structure dimensions approach 10-30 nanometer, current conditioning technology will be inadequate to maintain polishing performance within specifications. In this project, arrays of protrusions with engineered shapes and locations will be developed to be used as pad conditioners. They are expected to dramatically outperform the existing conditioners, demonstrating longer life-spans for pads and conditioners, finer polishing tolerances, increased reliability and predictability of pad conditioners, thus overall improved CMP performance.