SOLA Product Family
Products
Ultraviolet Thermal Processing (UVTP)
Dielectric materials designed to meet the insulation requirements of logic chips often have attributes that make them unusually difficult to use. These films are easily damaged and vulnerable to losing some of their insulating capability, which can lead to poor device performance.
To enable these applications, some films can be stabilized – and others enhanced to improve device performance–using specialized post-deposition film treatments available with Lam’s SOLA® UVTP product family.
Industry Challenges
As semiconductor manufacturing technologies incorporate dielectric films to improve device performance, innovative techniques are needed to ensure film integrity. Insulating films with low dielectric constants (k) are critical for continued scaling. However, the high carbon content and porosity that lower a film’s k-value also make it fragile and prone to damage. Furthermore, process steps such as etch, ash/strip, and wet clean can damage low-k materials and increase effective k-values through, for example, carbon loss or water adsorption. Because of this, innovative ultraviolet thermal processing (UVTP) techniques are needed to mechanically strengthen films, remove pore-generating precursors (porogens), and ensure low-k film integrity. UVTP can also be used to increase strain in front-end-of-the-line (FEOL) nitride layers in order to enhance device performance.
Key Customer Benefits
- Best-in-class film properties, within-wafer and wafer-to-wafer uniformity, and productivity
- Improved physical characteristics of a previously deposited film though modification by a proprietary treatment process (exposure to ultraviolet light, gases and vapors, and heat)
- Process flexibility through independent control of temperature, wavelength, and intensity at each station of the wafer path, enabled by Multi-Station Sequential Processing (MSSP) architecture
Product Offerings Pro
- SOLA® Excel
Key Applications
- Low-k film treatment
- Strained nitride film treatment