A perspective of MIM defect density performance improvement for automotive chip fabrication

One of the key challenges to qualify Metal Insulator Metal (MIM) capacitor passive devices for automotive grade integrated semiconductor manufacturing is to address the early breakdown failure mode observed with voltage ramp (Vramp) testing. Understanding the early failure mechanism is important in order to improve the process condition before subjecting the device to Time-Dependent-Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) stress as the ultimate test. In this paper, we investigated the defect density performance across a design of experiment on the related process condition and collected Vramp test on a vast sample size of 34,000 sites per split to obtain a statistically significant electrical response. We addressed two early failure mechanisms and showed improvements in those with improved processing conditions for MIM capacitor with 1fF/um2 capacitance density. This MIM capacitor was embedded within the fabrication of the dual damascene copper interconnect process.