Symposium Looks at New Chemistries

Staff -- Semiconductor International, 6/1/1998

SCP Global Technologies' (Boise, Idaho) Fifth International Symposium, "Between the Lines of the Roadmap," was held in Boise. Presenters from the United States, Japan and South Korea dealt with BEOL and FEOL challenges such as copper and low dielectrics, new developments on chemical spin etching and robust ways in which to deal with copper contamination issues, particularly edge of wafer and backside copper contamination.

Papers on developments in chemistry in back-end cleaning that offered simpler solutions and lower cost-of-ownership were presented, as well as discussions on brushless post-CMP cleaning, which was shown to offer significant advantages over brush scrubbing. Methods for measuring and understanding corrosion in BEOL cleaning chemistry and metals, and metals that will allow BEOL cleaning to continue advancing were detailed. Other presentations dealt with high-k materials offering outstanding die shrink potential, which present new challenges in cleaning opportunities and how process tool cost and effectiveness can be better understood though a model based on effectiveness space.

In giving a wrap-up of the sessions, Mark Peterson, president of SCP, indicated that the sessions showed that gate oxide measurement techniques have to be well understood to ensure that they are applied correctly as the technology moves to the thin gate oxides. "A scientific understanding of what goes on in these chemistries in the physical and the electrochemical sides is critical to solving these problems," indicated Peterson, "because standard old gate integrity testing changes as we get down into ultrathin gate oxides."

Next year's symposium is scheduled for April 28-30 in Boise.