ABSTRACT
The entire world has been revolutionized since the advent, during the 1960s, of monolithic silicon integrated circuits (ICs), and their large volume manufacturing. There is hardly any activity that mankind needs for its survival and progress that does not use ICs in one form or another. The rapid advancement of the science and the manufacturing technologies have now made Ultra Large Scale Integration (ULSI) an indispensable commercial reality. The world market in 1995 for all the semiconductor components including ICs was over $ 100 billion, which then feeds into the world electronic systems market exceeding about $ 1 trillion! These markets are expected to grow larger still due to the omnipresence of the ICs in ever increasing numbers of applications. A brief review of the current status and future directions of ULSICs will be presented. Although adhesion science has played a crucial role from the very inception of ICs, it has not yet been appreciated in the literature. While it is impossible to provide a review of all the techniques in this paper, a novel technique to characterize adhesion quantitatively, especially in microminiature geometries used in ULSICs, is presented here for the first time along with a model to explain the results. Another unique feature of this quantitative technique is that it enables adhesion characterization both during and after normal and accelerated test conditions. Such data are of extreme importance for the yield, reliability assessment and improvement of ULSICs as well as the forthcoming Ultra Performance ICs (UPICs), which are the ultimate in ICs beyond ULSICs.
