Study on the Effects of Corrosion Inhibitor According to the Functional Groups for Cu Chemical Mechanical Polishing in Neutral Environment

As the aluminum (Al) metallization process was replaced with copper (Cu), the damascene process was introduced, which required the planarization step to eliminate over-deposited Cu with Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) process. In this study, the verification of the corrosion inhibitors, one of the Cu CMP slurry components, was conducted to find out the tendency regarding the carboxyl and amino functional group in neutral environment. Through the results of etch rate, removal rate, and chemical ability of corrosion inhibitors based on 1H-1,2,4-triazole as the base corrosion inhibitor, while the amine functional group presents high Cu etching ability, carboxyl functional group shows lower Cu etching ability than base-corrosion inhibitor which means that it increases passivation effect by making strong passivation layer. It implies that the corrosion inhibitor with amine functional group was proper to apply for 1st Cu CMP slurry owing to the high etch rate and with carboxyl functional group was favorable for the 2nd Cu CMP slurry due to the high Cu removal rate/dissolution rate ratio.