Extendibility of the PECVD Porogen Approach for ULK Materials

Abstract

The increase of integrated circuits performances requires ultra-low dielectric constant (ULK) materials to minimize the drawbacks of miniaturization. Amorphous SiOCH are promising candidates for ULK materials as porosity can be introduced via a two steps elaboration. In a first step, organo-silicon species and organic species are co-deposited by PECVD. Then, a thermal annealing, alone or assisted by UV radiation, removes the organic labile phase and creates pore inclusions into the final material. In this work, the extendibility of this porogen approach is investigated in order to lower the dielectric constant. An increase of the porogen loading in hybrid film is studied by tuning the precursors ratio injected in the plasma gas feed. The increase of organic species amount is operated in order to create more pores sites. However, the post-treatment does not lead automatically to higher porosity. Actually, an increase of the porosity is observed only until a porogen loading limit and decreases above this limit. The shrinkage of the film during the post-treatment can explain this limitation. For high ratios of porogen, the film shrinkage increases drastically and leads to a decrease of the porosity finally created. At last, the link between porosity and dielectric constant is enlightened and a minimum in term of K value is reached with both post-treatments: dielectric constant of 2.1 and 2.3 are obtained using respectively thermal treatment and UV curing.