TOKYO ELECTRON AT limited *TOSHIBA CORPORATION SEMICONDUCTOR COMPANY

Recently IC maker request single wafer process because the number of wafer in 1 lot is small and the size of the wafers are larger. Usually spin on low-k material is used by furnace (FNC) for long time thermal cure process. A new electron beam (EB) cure equipment and process are developed to improve the mechanical strength of low-k dielectric, to reduce the time of cure process and to reduce thermal budget. By EB curing, JSR LKD (Low k Dielectric) material (k = 2.9) becomes 1.6 times stronger than conventional film. EB cure also shows considerable merit over FNC in cure time and power con- sumption for small batch size processing. For single wafer processing, the cure time is reduced from 30 minutes to 2 minutes. The power consumption is less then half of FNC case for 25 Wafers processing. Electric charge up damage is measured and proved to give little drawback for devices.

[1]  Douglas Yu,et al.  Low-k dielectrics characterization for damascene integration , 2001, Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 International Interconnect Technology Conference (Cat. No.01EX461).