Advanced Front-Side Circuit Edit of Cu Interconnects in Ga FIB

Advanced Cu interconnect technology with linewidth below 90nm entered into the mainstream foundry production in recent years, and presented challenge of editing small-linewidth Cu devices by commercial labs. Technological approaches to solving this challenge were proposed and demonstrated over the years, however all of them either require use of patented methodologies [1], closely-guarded secret chemistries [2], or may be practically usable only on the equipment of latest generation[3], and therefore unavailable or unaffordable for commercial service labs with existing toolset. By applying advanced methodologies of GAE recipe development [4,5] to Cu line deprocessing, it was possible to achieve uniform removal of thick Cu material (Fig. 1) in the existing 50KV Ga FIB systems with common precursors, widely and inexpensively available on second-hand market. Similar methodology is directly applicable to deprocessing thin Cu lines on signal layers of the ICs (Fig. 3), where thickness of the interlayer dielectric is 100nm and below. Developed methods are directly applicable to 30KV FIB equipment with suitable gas injection and raster generation hardware. Fig. 1 Minimized over-etch and elimination of roughness with GAE-like etching recipe and a combination of chemical and physical deprocessing techniques. Total time for deprocessing 3um-thick Cu bus line is ~2 hours.

Fig. 2 Cu line on M5 layer with ~100nm underlying dielectric is exposed (a) and cut (b) without breaking through the inter-layer dielectric between M5 and M4. References:
1. Phaneuf M. et. al, US Patent 6,641,705 2. Lindquist T. at. al, Etching Copper & Not the Dielectric presentation on European FIB User Group, available online http://www.imec.be/efug/EFUG2003_Lundquist.pdf 3. FEI Company V400ACE Focused Ion Beam High Performance Circuit Edit and Design Debug Solution product brochure, available at http://www.fei.com/products/focused-ion-beams/v400ace.aspx 4. Ray V. Fluorocarbon Precursor for High Aspect Ratio Via Milling in Focused Ion Beam Modification of Integrated Circuits. Proceedings ISTFA 2004 pp. 534 537 5. Ray V. Recipe Development Considerations for Focused Ion Beam Gas Assisted Etching 8th EFUG meeting 2004 available online at http://www.imec.be/efug/EFUG2004_Ray1.pdf

Valery Ray , PBS&T

www.freudlabs.com

vray@partbeamsystech.com Material Analysis Technology

Chung Hung Chen, Ching Chi Yang www.ma-tek.com Chen