Pattern damage and slurry behavior analysis of CMP process by mechanical and fluid simulations-Yi-Sheng Cheng

Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) technique is widely applied in the semiconductor industry nowadays. The CMP working mechanism is the interaction of the chemical reaction and mechanical polishing to remove the undesired materials in the circumstance with the feeding slurry and the polishing pad. As the device scale shrink, defect and uniformity control have become the major challenge and critical issues of CMP process. Since the CMP performance strongly depends on the consumable parts with complex process parameters, it may take plenty of consumable cost and working hours to improve the processes issues. Therefore the finite element method for the CMP process simulation is adopted to improve the efficiency of CMP process tuning in recent years [1].