ABSTRACT
Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) is recognized as a promising planarization method in integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing. A detailed description of the CMP process can be found in several references (e.g., Steigerwald et al., 1997; Luo and Dornfeld, 2004; Oliver, 2004). CMP is a necessary process step for < 250-nm line width oxide layers and is a critical operation in the Cu dual damascene (CuDD) technology because the yields are extremely sensitive to the CMP performance. By removing all previous metal-layer deposits, CMP represents a kind of reverse processing. The product quality resulting from a Cu-CMP process depends largely on the spatial (local and global) uniformity of the
material removal rate (MRR) and the associated defect density, while the process efciency is largely dependent on the magnitude of the mean MRR.
