Challenges of aluminum RIE technology at sub 0.45 /spl mu/m pitches [DRAM interconnects]

Aluminum based wiring is common in the back-end-of-line (BEOL) metallization of DRAM chips. The 256 Mb DRAM chips necessitate the fabrication of wires at minimum pitch, especially when a stitched architecture is used. The critical topics related to extending aluminum interconnects by reactive ion etch (RIE) technology are discussed in this paper.