• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2001.07a
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• pp.33-36
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• 2001

Chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) process has been widely used to planarize dielectric layers, which can be applied to the integrated circuits for deep sub-micron technology. The rise throughput and the stability in the device fabrication can be obtained by applying of CMP process to STI structure in 0.18$\mu\textrm{m}$ m semiconductor device. The reverse moat process has been added to employ in of each thin films in STI-CMP was not equal, hence the devices must to be effected, that is, the damage was occurred in the device area for the case of excessive CMP process and the nitride film was remained on the device area for the case of insufficient CMP process, and than, these defects affect the device characteristics. Also, we studied the High Selectivity Slurry(HSS) to perform global planarization without reverse moat step.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2003.07a
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• pp.223-226
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• 2003

We propose an improvement method for a $\underline{G}ate$ $\underline{OX}ide(GOX)$ thinning at the edge of $\underline{S}hallow$ $\underline{T}rench$ $\underline{I}solation(STI)$, when STI is adopted to Dual Gate Oxide(DGOX) Process. In the case of SOC(System On-a-Chip), the DGOX process is usually used for realizing both a low and a high voltage parts in one chip. However, it is found that the severe GOX thinning occurs from at STI top edge region and a dent profile exists at the top edge of STI, when conventional DGOX and STI process carried out in high density device chip. In order to overcome this problem, a new DGOX process is tried in this study. And we are able to prevent the GOX thinning by H2 anneal, partially SiN liner skip, and a method which is merged a thick sidewall oxide(S/O) with a SiN pull-back process. Therefore, a good subthreshold characteristics without a double hump is obtained by the prevention of a GOX thinning and a deep dent profile.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 2002.10b
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• pp.443-444
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• 2002

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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.272-278
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• 2002

Recently, STI(Shallow Trench Isolation) process has attracted attention for high density of semiconductor device as a essential isolation technology. In this paper, the effect of pattern density, trench width and selectivity of slurry on dishing in STI CMP process was investigated by using specially designed isolation pattern. As trench width increased, the dishing tends to increase. At $20{\mu}m$ pattern size, the dishing was decreased with increasing pattern density Low selectivity slurry shows less dishing at over $160{\mu}m$ trench width, whereas high selectivity slurry shows less dishing at below $160{\mu}m$ trench width.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2000.04b
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• pp.35-38
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• 2000

In this study, the rise throughput and the stability in fabrication of device can be obtained by applying of CMP process to STI structure in 0.l8um semiconductor device. Through reverse moat pattern process, reduced moat density at high moat density, STI CMP process with low selectivity could be to fit polish uniformity between low moat density and high moat density. Because this reason, in-situ motor current end point detection method is not fit to the current EPD technology with the reverse moat pattern. But we use HSS without reverse moat pattern on STI CMP and take end point current sensing signal.[1] To analyze sensing signal and test extracted signal, we can to adjust wafer difference within $110{\AA}$.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2001.07a
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• pp.54-57
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• 2001

We studied the characteristics of polishing pad, which can apply STI-CMP process for global planarization of multilevel interconnection structure. Also, we investigated the effects of different sets of polishing pad, such as soft and hard pad. As an experimental result, hard pad showed center-fast type, and soft pad showed edge-fast type. Totally, the defect level has shown little difference, however, the counts of scratch was defected less than 2 on JRlll pad. Through the above results, we can select optimum polishing pad, so we can expect the improvements of throughput and devise yield.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2001.07a
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• pp.25-28
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• 2001

Recently, STI(Shallow Trench Isolation) process has attracted attention for high density of semiconductor device as a essential isolation technology. Without applying the conventional complex reverse moat process, CMP(Chemical Mechanical Polishing) has established the Process simplification. However, STI-CMP process have various defects such as nitride residue, torn oxide defect, damage of silicon active region, etc. To solve this problem, in this paper, we discussed to determine the control limit of process, which can entirely remove oxide on nitride from the moat area of high density as reducing the damage of moat area and minimizing dishing effect in the large field area. We, also, evaluated the reliability and reproducibility of STI-CMP process through the optimal process conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.15 no.10
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• pp.838-843
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• 2002

Chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) process has been widely used to planarize dielectric layers, which can be applied to the integrated circuits for deep sub-micron technology. The reverse moat etch process has been used for the shallow trench isolation(STI)-chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) process with conventional low selectivity slurries. Thus, the process became more complex, and the defects were seriously increased. In this paper, we studied the direct STI-CMP process without reverse moat etch step using high selectivity slurry(HSS). As our experimental results show, it was possible to achieve a global planarization without the complicated reverse moat process, the STI-CMP process could be dramatically simplified, and the defect level was reduced. Therefore the throughput, yield, and stability in the ULSI semiconductor device fabrication could be greatly improved.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 1999.05a
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• pp.211-213
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• 1999

In this paper, we documented the controlling oxide removal amount on the pattern wafer using removal rate and removal thickness of blanket wafer. There was the strong correlation relationship for both(correlation factor:0.7109). So, we could confirm the repeatability as applying for STI CMP process from the obtained linear formular. As the result of repeatability test, the difference of calculated polishing time and actual polishing time was 3.48 seconds based on total 50 lots. If this time is converted into the thickness, it is from 104$\AA$ to 167$\AA$. It is possible to be ignored because it is under the process margin.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.5-9
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• 2002

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) has become the preferred planarization method for multilevel interconnect technology due to its ability to achieve a high degree of feature level planarity. Especially, to achieve the higher density and greater performance, shallow trench isolation (STI)-CMP process has been attracted attention for multilevel interconnection as an essential isolation technology. Also, it was possible to apply the direct STI-CMP process without reverse moat etch step using high selectivity slurry (HSS). In this work, we determined the process margin with optimized process conditions to apply HSS STI-CMP process. Then, we evaluated the reliability and reproducibility of STI-CMP process through the optimal process conditions. The wafer-to-wafer thickness variation and day-by-day reproducibility of STI-CMP process after repeatable tests were investigated. Our experimental results show, quite acceptable and reproducible CMP results with a wafer-to-wafer thickness variation within 400$\AA$.