Arc Suppression and Defect Reduction in Semiconductor Metallization

Suppression of arcing between the target and plasma during PVD is a key issue for defect reduction, yield improvement and high quality metallization in microelectronics manufacturing. An integrated mini sparcle product has been designed for Endura HP PVD™ sputtering sources. Characteristics of arcing and mechanisms for suppression are discussed here. Process characterization with Ti, TiN and Al sputtering proves that the arc suppression unit has little adverse impact on film properties. The uniformity of reactive sputtered TiN is improved with arc suppression. Marathon evaluation indicates significant reduction in TiN defect and Interconnect metal stack defect. The study of the application for a wide variety of materials (Al, Ti, TiN, SiW, Si) establishes a correlation between deposition rate loss and sputtering power and this relation is found to be almost independent of the materials sputtered. The impact on throughput for typical metal stack is also presented in this paper.