Thermal Stress-Induced Grain Boundary Voiding and Notching in Narrow Al-Based Metallizations

Abstract

AbstractGrain boundary voiding has been identified as a diffusional creep mechanism that produces failure of narrow Al-based metallizations during thermal aging. It is considered to be a reliability concern for sub-micron metallizations because the resulting failure rate has been observed to be strongly line width dependent. This paper presents a theoretical model for stress-induced grain boundary voiding. The proposed model is shown to account for the experimentally observed temperature and time dependence of thermal aging-induced line failure data reported in the literature.