Sep 10 2008
Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials, CMP Technologies, a leader and innovator in chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) technology for the global semiconductor industry, today announced that its novel defect reduction and slurry reduction groove designs for CMP pads are quickly gaining market acceptance across the globe. Customers around the world are now adopting these new groove designs, which offer significant improvements in process performance, to help meet their defect requirements, extend pad lifetimes and reduce the overall cost of CMP consumables.
Rohm and Haas’s defect reduction groove has 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 90 nm process node and below, multiple customers are now also testing the defect reduction groove on the VisionPad™ line of CMP pads.
At the same time, the company’s recently introduced slurry reduction groove design is also experiencing a high level of interest, with several customers now in testing. Results at Taiwan based IC manufacturers and other customers have been extremely promising, demonstrating the targeted 30 percent reduction in slurry usage with excellent polishing performance.
“Our pad offering is the most robust in the industry, and these novel grooves specifically address customer needs that allow them to meet or exceed their performance and cost requirements,” said Mario Stanghellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Asia Pacific Region for the CMP Technologies business of Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials. “To meet highly complex planarization challenges, we are currently testing a profile correction groove design, which addresses customer-specific process issues, but does not require them to modify their integration schemes. This will offer a major competitive advantage over other available solutions.”
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.
The slurry reduction groove design, based on specialized flow experiments and computational fluid modeling, has achieved a greater than 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.
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. The global CMP Technologies team works closely with customers to find the optimal groove and pad product for each process.