Chemical Vapor Deposited Teflon Amorphous Fluoropolymer as an Interlevel Dielectric Material for Low Power Integrated Circuits

Abstract

AbstractThe development of materials with dielectric constant (K) less than SiO2(K=3.9) is essential to meet the stringent speed, power dissipation and crosstalk requirements that are driving the low power integrated circuit (IC) paradigm. Both the low K dielectric and the processing methodology used for it should satisfy several important criteria before the technique can be accepted in future mainstream low power IC manufacturing. We had reported earlier a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technique for the deposition of DuPont's Teflon amorphous fluoropolymer 1600 (bulk K=1.93) using the principle of direct liquid injection. The processing was carried out with and without an ultra violet (UV) light source in a computerized rapid isothermal processing (RIP) system.Recently, we have extensively characterized the films and examined the suitability of our technique in light of some of the requirements of the future IC industry. Our results indicate that the processed films exceed several of the established dielectric performance standards outlined in recent roadmaps for sub 0.25 μm ICs. The film properties were improved when the UV source was used during processing. CVD processed films in general demonstrated significant improvements in terms of manufacturability, throughput, cost, and dielectric properties over the same films processed by alternate techniques.