A comparison of the mechanical stability of silicon nitride films deposited with various techniques

Abstract A comparison of mechanical properties of amorphous silicon nitride thin films deposited with various techniques used for microelectronic applications was conducted. Nitride films with thicknesses less than 80 nm were deposited on (0 0 1) oriented silicon wafers by using various methods: low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD), rapid thermal CVD (RTCVD), atomic layer deposition (ALD) and plasma enhanced CVD (PECVD). The wafer curvature method was used to show that the as-deposited LPCVD, RTCVD and ALD films exhibited tensile residual stresses that decreased with silicon richness. In contrast, the stress of the PECVD as-deposited layers ranged from tensile to ultra-compressive, depending on the exposure to high plasma power and ion bombardment during growth. After high temperature annealing, the LPCVD, RTCVD and ALD nitride stresses were almost unchanged, indicating that these films/substrate systems have significant thermal mechanical stability. In contrast, it was observed that, regardless of the initial stress, the annealed PECVD films developed tensile stress after high temperature treatment, with the same dependence of stress on refractive index as was found with the other deposition techniques. The Young's moduli, measured by performing nano-indentation on 200 nm thick nitride layers, were found for most samples to be correlated with film density.