Stress-Induced Phenomena in Metallization

Stress-induced voiding and electromigration have emerged to become key reliability problems for submicron interconnect metallization. This has led to the First International Stress Workshop on Stress-Induced Phenomena in Metallization held at Cornell University in 1991, and the series has continued to the Tenth Stress Workshop held at The University of Texas at Austin on November 5-7, 2008. This book contains the proceedings of the 10th Stress Workshop.

Following the spirit of the previous workshops, this workshop emphasized new research results and advances in basic understanding on stress induced phenomena in metallization. The goal was to provide a forum for exchange of ideas, bringing into focus the technical and scientific issues and identifying needs and directions for future research. This is reflected in the papers included in the proceedings. A number of papers reported results on electromigration and stress-induced void formation in copper low k interconnects using state-of-the-art methods including in-situ transmission electron microscopy and synchrotron x-ray microdiffraction. These studies demonstrated the metrology development for studying the stress-induced phenomena in copper interconnect structure at the nanoscale. A new topic on nanostructures and future interconnects has also been included in this workshop.