TY - THES ID - 138759157 TI - Passivation of Copper Lines by Spin-on Deposition of Self-Assembled Monolayers for Area-Selective Atomic Layer Deposition AU - De bruyn, Dennis AU - De Gendt, Stefan AU - Armini, Silvia AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Wetenschappen. Opleiding Master in de chemie (uitdovend programma vanaf 2018-2019) (Leuven) PY - 2019 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Wetenschappen DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:138759157 AB - The most often referred guideline in the semiconductor industry is Moore’s law. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles each two years. To fulfil this guideline, both the dimension of the devices, such as transistors, capacitors and resistors as well as the interconnects has to be downscaled. When scaling down these dimensions, the processes used for the fabrication of these devices and interconnects, optical lithography, reveal some weaknesses. In the past, the optical lithography showed some excellent patterning properties, and these resulted in the exponential growth of the semiconductor industry. Nowadays, the patterning dimensions decrease, and errors occur with this top-down technique. An example of this, is the increase of the edge placement errors (EPEs), that can lead to a total chip failure. Furthermore, the lithography-etch processes make use of expensive and polluting chemicals. This generates a lot of waste which is not environmentally friendly resulting in an unsustainable scenario. Therefore, a greener alternative that can deposit material in a selective way in a bottom-up fashion is desired. A selective deposition is obtained by combining an activation or passivation step and a material growth step. In this thesis, a passivation with the use of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs), will be investigated for further atomic layer deposition (ALD), which represents the growth step. In this way, an area-selective atomic layer deposition is achieved. In particular, a thiol as SAM is used to passivate copper lines in a silicon dioxide substrate, to deposit Hafnium Nitride on the silicon dioxide with the ALD later on. The SAM is deposited in a spin-on manner, to passivate the copper lines in a short time and on an entire 300 millimeter wafer area. Different deposition methods are investigated to check the SAM passivation property. A good passivation film shows a high coverage, selectivity and thermal stability. By measuring thickness, surface hydrophobicity, roughness, sulphur concentration, coverage and defectivity, quantitative results are obtained to draw up a conclusion about the quality of the SAM copper passivation film. From all these results, the conclusion can be made that different SAM spin-on deposition methods are possible for the passivation of copper lines. The most interesting deposition method that showed the best results is a procedure that contains a slow spin, in order to contain a thin layer of SAM that is subsequently baked on the substrate by an anneal step. In this way, high selectivity and low defectivity are obtained for both the passivation of copper and patterned substrates. The main drawback of this manual coupon spin-on deposition method is the non-uniformity across the coupon surface. Especially on smaller coupons, centrifugal forces influence the thickness and coverage of the organic film, leading to changes in defectivity and selectivity upon changing the location of characterization on the coupon. Therefore, an investigation for the upscaling to full wafer experiments to reduce this non-uniformity is necessary. ER -