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New Product: Rohm and Haas’ groove designs for CMP pads reduces cost of consumables
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Product Briefing Outline: Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials have said that its novel defect reduction and slurry reduction groove designs for CMP pads have already been adopted in high volume manufacturing (HVM) by customers in Europe, Korea, North America and Taiwan. While currently being used on the Rohm and Haas IC1000 AT CMP pad for the 90nm process node and below, multiple customers are now also testing the defect reduction groove on the ‘VisionPad’ line of CMP pads.
Problem: To meet highly complex planarization challenges, Rohm and Haas are currently testing a profile correction groove design, which addresses customer-specific process issues, but does not require them to modify their integration schemes.
Solution: The slurry reduction groove design, based on specialized flow experiments and computational fluid modeling, is claimed to achieve greater than a 30 percent reduction in the cost of consumables in metals processes. This performance is made possible through improving slurry delivery to the leading edge of the wafer, improving utilization of slurry in pad-wafer gap, and reducing slurry flow rate requirement for a given removal rate.
The defect reduction groove design features an innovative constant area spiral pattern that is optimized for both wafer-scale and groove-scale mechanics. The design effectively removes localized pressure on the wafer, minimizing scratches and defects, and has demonstrated up to a 50 percent improvement in defectivity rates.
Applications: A variety of CMP applications at the 90nm node and below.
Platform: Rohm and Haas’s novel groove designs can be used on various VisionPad and IC1000 AT pad products, and can be customized based on customer requirements and existing consumable sets, or on desired process conditions.
Availability: September 2008 onwards.