SBIR Phase II: Chemically Impregnated Nanoparticles for Use in Copper Chemical Mechanical Planarization Slurry

This Small Business Innovative Research Phase II project is focused on the development of a copper chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) slurry. An important step in semiconductor manufacturing is CMP, which uses an aqueous slurry containing abrasives and chemical components in conjunction with a polishing pad to remove material and to planarize the wafer. As device sizes decrease, next generation CMP slurries must achieve planarization on increasingly higher aspect ratio structures. Current copper CMP slurries have a limited planarization efficiency (PE) (ratio of step height removed to thickness removed). Without an improvement in PE, CMP is going to become an increasingly expensive and limiting step in the semiconductor manufacturing process. The proposed effort aims to develop a copper CMP slurry containing nano-sized contact release capsules (nano-CRC). Nano-CRC based slurries consist of a core-shell nanoparticle where the mechanical and chemical components are combined into a single entity. Use of the nano-CRC slurry yields simultaneously high PE and high material removal rate, which will improve planarity and decrease processing costs for semiconductor manufacturers. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes advancing the state-of-the-art in CMP slurry formulation and enabling the continued scale down of next generation microelectronic devices. The copper CMP slurry market is currently $340M, and expected to grow to greater than $500M by 2016 due to the increase in the number of Cu CMP steps as devices continue to shrink. Additionally, a copper CMP slurry that can achieve both high through-put and high planarity would yield a product with a very high return on investment for semiconductor manufacturers. The nano-CRC technology can be used to impregnate nanoparticles with different chemical payloads, and different base nanoparticles can also be used (i.e. alumina). The technology has potential to be used as a platform to provide solutions for a variety of industries, both within the realm of CMP where it may be possible to use on other CMP polishing steps, and also for other non-CMP polishing processes, including optical materials, glass polishing, cleaning, etc.