Simulation on Polishing Pad Wear in CMP Conditioning with Split Conditioner Disk

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is one of essential semiconductor fabrication processes to obtain highly integrated device. Many consumables are used in CMP process such as slurry, polishing pad, and diamond disk etc. Especially, the polishing pad determines the material removal rate (MRR) and its uniformity in CMP process. The CMP process requires pad conditioning to re-generate pad roughness; however, the conditioning with diamond disk results in pad wear. In this paper, authors proposed a novel CMP conditioning method with a split conditioner disk. According to numerical simulation, the analysis results show that the proposed split disk has lower pad wear rates and smoother wear profiles than commercial disk. Finally, it is likely that the proposed method can increase the lifetime of polishing pad in CMP process.