Copper may destroy chip-level reliability: handle with care-mechanism and conditions for copper migrated resistive short formation

Although copper has a number of advantageous parameters in comparison with aluminum, and therefore, is expected to become the metallization of future high-speed, high-density silicon devices, its application introduces a new failure mechanism into the systems which has never occurred with aluminum; this is the electrochemical migration (not equal to the electromigration) resulting in short circuit formation between adjacent metallization stripes under DC bias. A great alert signal must be given for semiconductor producers in order to perform lifetime tests before introducing copper into the everyday fabrication process, otherwise the reliability of future electronic systems may dramatically be destroyed.