2022/04/24 by Rémi Demoulin, Richard Daubriac, Demoulin, Remi +13
Engineering · Materials Science · #Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) #Copper Interconnects and Reliability #FOS: Physical sciences #Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis #Semiconductor materials and devices
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.11196
openalex publication_date 2022/04/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The need of surface-localized thermal processing is strongly increasing especially w.r.t three-dimensionally (3D) integrated electrical devices. UV laser annealing (UV-LA) technology well addresses this challenge. Particularly UV-LA can reduce resistivity by enlarging metallic grains in lines or thin films, irradiating only the interconnects for short timescales. However, the risk of failure in electrical performance must be correctly managed, and that of UV-LA has not been deeply studied yet. In this work microsecond-scale UV-LA is applied on a stack comparable to an interconnect structure (dielectric/Cu/Ta/SiO2/Si) in either melt or sub-melt regime for grain growth. The failure modes such as (i) Cu diffusion into SiO2, (ii) O incorporation into Cu, and (iii) intermixing between Cu and Ta are investigated.