Characterization of copper line array erosion with picosecond ultrasonics

Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) is a critical process for creating high performance interconnected structures. If line structures are under polished, residual copper or barrier will short out the circuitry resulting in defective dies. However, over polishing increases the line resistance, negatively impacting both the speed and performance of devices. To maintain high yield, it is thus critical to maintain the copper lines at the desired thickness. This requires strict process control. Several metrology techniques are used to monitor CMP processes including optical techniques that measure dielectric polishing and high resolution profilometry (HRP (TM)) that can measure the relative step height differences between structures such as interlayer dielectric pads, copper pads, and line arrays. In contrast, the picosecond ultrasonic laser sonar method (PULSE (TM)) measures the copper thickness and therefore directly measures the parameter of interest for CMP process monitoring. The picosecond ultrasonic technique is well established for measuring on solid copper structures such as pads. However, in the dense narrow line arrays that are required for current and next generation devices, the measurement spot size, while only approximately 10 mu m in diameter, may cover hundreds of copper line/dielectric pairs. Therefore a new detector was developed that is insensitive to the dielectric signal. The capabilities of picosecond ultrasonic laser method to measure both copper pads and 0.6 mu m line arrays were recently tested at STMicroelectronics (STM). The results were compared against Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The samples included different products and six different metal layers. This paper will further describe the picosecond ultrasonic method, its use at STM, and detailed results for the various samples.