Chemical-mechanical polishing and material characteristics of plasma-enhanced chemically vapor deposited fluorinated oxide thin films

Abstract

The chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) process has been proven to be the most promising method for accomplishing global planarization. In this paper, results of chemical-mechanical polishing of fluorinated silicon dioxide (SiOF) thin films are presented. Nanohardness, elastic modulus, and bonding structure of fluorinated silicon dioxides are characterized in order to evaluate their correlations with CMP performance. The results show that under fixed chemistry and mechanical parameters, the CMP removal rate increases significantly with increasing fluorine content in the oxides due to the lower hardness and elastic modulus in the films. Higher CMP removal rate is observed for fluorinated oxides polished with slurry of pH 10 relative to pH 9. Compared with undoped oxides, SiOF films are more sentisitive to chemical and moisture attacks as reflected by the post-CMP increase in refractive index.