Investigation of Mechanical Integrity and its effect on Polishing for Novel Polyurethane Polishing Pad

Abstract

AbstractThere is a widespread interest in development and characterization of CMP consumables due to an existing and potential market, as the CMP process becomes widely accepted in the field of microelectronics fabrication. A non-destructive Ultra Sound Testing (UST) technique developed at the University of South Florida has been successfully used in the past to map the variation of specific gravity over the entire volume of the pad. To gage the impact of the variation in specific gravity with in the body of the polishing pad, the results of UST of pads need to be correlated with actual polishing performance of the pad. In this research, UST was performed on IC 1000 Suba IV/ A4 polishing pad, and novel polyurethane pads, Pad A (with sub pad) and Pad B (without sub pad). The novel pads have been specifically developed for Interlayer Dielectric (ILD) polishing. 6 inch coupons from polishing pad regions of interest (high and low ultra sound transmission) determined after the ultrasound map were punched out and further evaluated. The mechanical properties of the pad material from the coupons were evaluated using Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) and tribological properties were evaluated by performing CMP on 6 inch coupons in the CETR CMP tester.