Novel EBSD sample preparation and applications to failure analysis cases

Electron beam backscatter diffraction (EBSD) can provide valuable local microstructural information for crystalline materials such as grain size, grain orientation, and texture. However when this method is applied to Cu/low-k dielectrics, factors such as charging, drifting and instability of the low-k material can seriously compromise the quality of the EBSD data. Sample preparation techniques, for both top view and cross-sectional samples, are introduced in this work to minimize these effects and enable acquisition of EBSD data with good quality. Some of the factors that affect the quality of EBSD data can be correlated to physical or electrical data; in particular one example shows that degradation in the quality of the EBSD data in a Cu via can explain the higher resistance measured in that via.