Effect of slurries on the dishing of Shallow Trench Isolation structure during CMP process

The uniformity of field oxide is critical to isolation property of device in STI, so the control of field oxide thickness in STI-CMP becomes enormously important. The loss of field oxide in shallow trench isolation comes mainly from dishing and erosion in STI-CMP. In this paper, the effect of slurries on the dishing was investigated with both blanket and patterned wafers were selected to measure the removal rate, selectivity and dishing amount. Dishing was a strong function of pattern spacing and types of slurries. Dishing was significantly decreased with decreasing pattern spacing for both slurries. Significantly lower dishing with ceria based slurry than with silica based slurry were achieved when narrow pattern spacing were used. Possible dishing mechanism with two different slurries were discussed based on the observed experimental results.