Hongkai Li

Kinematic analysis of in situ measurement during chemical mechanical planarization process

Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) is the most widely used planarization technique in semiconductor manufacturing presently. With the aid of in situ measurement technology, CMP tools can achieve good performance and stable productivity. However, the in situ measurement has remained unexplored from a kinematic standpoint. The available related resources for the kinematic analysis are very limited due to the complexity and technical secret. In this paper, a comprehensive kinematic analysis of in situ measurement is provided, including the analysis model, the measurement trajectory, and the measurement time of each zone of wafer surface during the practical CMP process. In addition, a lot of numerical calculations are performed to study the influences of main parameters on the measurement trajectory and the measurement velocity variation of the probe during the measurement process. All the efforts are expected to improve the in situ measurement system and promote the advancement in CMP control system.

Signal processing and analysis for copper layer thickness measurement within a large variation range in the CMP process

In the copper (Cu) chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) process, accurate determination of a process reaching the end point is of great importance. Based on the eddy current technology, the in situ thickness measurement of the Cu layer is feasible. Previous research studies focus on the application of the eddy current method to the metal layer thickness measurement or endpoint detection. In this paper, an in situ measurement system, which is independently developed by using the eddy current method, is applied to the actual Cu CMP process. A series of experiments are done for further analyzing the dynamic response characteristic of the output signal within different thickness variation ranges. In this study, the voltage difference of the output signal is used to represent the thickness of the Cu layer, and we can extract the voltage difference variations from the output signal fast by using the proposed data processing algorithm. The results show that the voltage difference decreases as thickness decreases in the conventional measurement range and the sensitivity increases at the same time. However, it is also found that there exists a thickness threshold, and the correlation is negative, when the thickness is more than the threshold. Furthermore, it is possible that the in situ measurement system can be used within a larger Cu layer thickness variation range by creating two calibration tables.

Motor Power Signal Analysis for End-Point Detection of Chemical Mechanical Planarization

In the integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing, in-situ end-point detection (EPD) is an important issue in the chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) process. In the paper, we chose the motor power signal of the polishing platen as the monitoring object. We then used the moving average method, which was appropriate for in-situ calculation process and made it easy to code for software development, to smooth the signal curve, and then studied the signal variation during the actual CMP process. The results demonstrated that the motor power signal contained the end-point feature of the metal layer removal, and the processed signal curve facilitated the feature extraction and it was relatively steady before and after the layer transition stage. In addition, the motor power signal variation of the polishing head was explored and further analysis of time delay was performed.

In-situ Cu layer thickness measurement during chemical mechanical planarization

In this paper, the eddy current method is used for measuring the thickness variation of Cu layer during chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) process. And an in-situ measurement system has been developed. A series of experiments have been done on the Universal-300 CMP system for evaluating the feasibility and reliability of the in-situ measurement system, and the accuracy of the system is presented. According to the experiment results, this technique can reach to nano-scale measurement and satisfies the in-situ measurement requirements. All the efforts are expected to further improve the in situ measurement technique, and ensure that the CMP system works efficiently.