What will be the next interconnect
material for Gigabyte and GigaHertz devices ?
Interconnects will definitely continue to be made of
high purity aluminum alloys for the balance of the 20 th century and most probably for the
beginning of the 21 th century too.
These last ten years, HP Aluminum has been able to meet all
the new challenging purchasing criteria of the IC makers :
Continuous improvement of purity : global purity (sum of
total metallic elements for 5N, 5N5 to 6N) as well as elementary purity (element by
element)
Low alpha emitters such as U and Th in order to avoid soft
errors; the brand new purification technology by segregation can get with only one pass
levels of U+Th less than 1 ppb at a much lower cost than the old melting zone process.
Thin, equiaxial and isotropic grains to guarantee
homogenous thickness of interconnects layers.
The main technical challenge of these last two years has
been to get particle and inclusion free Aluminum Alloys ingots (utilized as starting
material by target makers). Indeed micro-arcing phenomena (mainly due to inclusions and
particles) destroy the yield of the IC makers because of deposited defects on the wafer
surface and non homogeneous thickness of interconnect layers.
To deliver ultra-clean product would never have been
possible without the ultrasonic inspection, which will be the future standard to guarantee
the reliability of the whole volume of the product.
Last but not least customers are not looking for wishful
thinking speech about quality, but they are demanding proofs of the consistency of the
product. It is the reason why we consider that delivering traceability shall become the
first condition for the qualification of a material supplier. PECHINEY HIGH PURITY
(PHP) has anticipated all these expectations of the market with its well-known low U+Th
purity, controlled grain quality.
PHP is the sole 5N5 Aluminum Alloys supplier capable of
guarantying the cleanliness of each ingot by ultrasonic inspection with its GIGALLOYS 97 generation. With its new GIGALLOYS 98 product line, PHP has based its information system
on the internet-extranet technologies. For each ingot the key traceable information is
encapsulated in the PHP intranet and regularly transferred to a private and secured
customer oriented extranet. Such technical breakthroughs will increase yield by the end
customer.
|
