New Materials to Battle the Transistor Interconnect Bottleneck

With ever decreasing transistor size, materials that combine both diffusion barrier and liner material properties are needed to successfully electroplate Cu and thus beat the current interconnect bottleneck. In order to facilitate coating of high aspect ratio vias, the material should be as thin as possible. One possibility to achieve this is presented in this study, where we investigate through density functional theory, the behavior Cu on Ru-doped and Ru passivated ε-TaN (1 1 0). Initially, the adsorption, diffusion and association of one and two Cu atoms on the different surfaces was studied in order to probe the early stages of film growth. This showed that, while surface diffusion of atoms was more favourable on the Ru-passivated surface, the Ru dopant acts as a nucleation site for Cu, with atoms preferentially diffusing towards it. In order to understand the mechanism of film growth on this surface in more detail and to fine-tune the barrier and liner properties of the material, the effect of different percentages of surface doping were studied. Further, the behavior of Cu13 and Cu29 clusters on different doped surfaces and on the passivated surfaces was investigated. In particular, the study focused on the pathways toward agglomeration as well as the associated activation energies. We find that on a Ru doped surface the atoms agglomerate spontaneously to form a two-layer film, whereas they remain in a monolayer on Ru-passivated TaN (1 1 0).