Application of Hard Porous Pad in Metal CMP Process

There are four main components of the CMP process: polishing pad, slurry, elastic supporter, and pad conditioner. The polishing pad is an essential component to the reproducibility of polishing uniformity in CMP process. However, the polishing pad in recently using metal CMP raised the several points of high cost caused by the increase of cycle time and the many usage of slurry. It is necessary to develop the novel polishing pad which would lead the cost reduction by the higher pad life-cycle, minimized cycle time and lower slurry usage. The characteristics of polishing pad were studied on the effects of different sets of the Polishing pad, which can be applied to metal chemical mechanical polishing process for global planarization of multilevel interconnection structure. The main purpose of this experiment is cost reduction by the increase of pad life-time, the decrease of cycle time and the lower usage of slurry through the specific hard porous structured pad design. It is confirmed that the novel polishing pad made the slurry usage decrease to 60% as well as the pad life-time increase twice with the 25% improvement of removal rate. The polishing time could be decreased and it also helped the cycle time to diminish. It can be expected that this results will help both the process throughput and the device yield to be improved.

금속 CMP 공정시 경질 다공성 패드의 적용