The Thermal Effects of CMP as a Particle Augmented Mixed Lubrication Tribosystem

Abstract

ABSTRACTMost chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) researchers assume that the polishing occurs in the mixed-lubrication regime, where the applied load on the wafer is supported by the hydrodynamic slurry pressure and the contact stress generated during the pad-wafer contact. Consequently, the particle augmented mixed lubrication (PAML) approach has been employed as an extremely high-fidelity asperity-scale mixed-lubrication CMP model in the past. Recently, a more computationally efficient PAML approach, PAML-lite, which considers the slurry’s fluid and particle dynamics, the pad/wafer contact mechanics, and the resulting material removal, was introduced. The current work presents the PAML-lite framework with the isothermal assumption relaxed. As a result, wafer-scale interfacial temperatures during CMP can be predicted by considering asperity heating and dissipation of the heat into the solid and fluid media in the sliding contact.