Stress migration risk on electromigration reliability in advanced narrow line copper interconnects

Abstract

The influence of stress migration (SM) on the electromigration (EM) reliability is studied here for very fine line interconnects, fabricated using the 45-nm Cu/low-κ interconnect process flow. As opposed to the current understanding that SM is not a concern for the narrow metal lines because of limited availability of vacancies for voiding, we found that SM does have serious wear-out effects. The EM lifetime distribution was severely degraded by around 38% for the samples that had been subjected to a 1000-h SM-only test, with a drastic reduction in the slope of the EM lognormal fitting distribution, from 0.548 to 0.193. The current density exponent of Black’s equation for SM+EM stressed samples is ∼1, suggesting that void had already been nucleated because of the SM-only test. The high intrinsic tensile stress in the line is suspected to be responsible for this early void nucleation. In the second part, we developed a Monte Carlo simulation model to estimate the void nucleation and growth time using the EM-only and SM+EM degradation tests. We found that at low percentile failures overall failure time is mainly growth dominated, whereas at high percentile failures overall failure time is nucleation dominated. Stress migration was found to shorten the nucleation time for all the samples.