Electrochemical reliability of plasma-polymerized cyclohexane films deposited on copper in microelectronic devices

As the circuit density of electric equipment steadily increases, metallization processes demand new conductors with higher electrical conductivities and inter-layer dielectrics with lower dielectric constants, in order to overcome the limitation of conventional aluminum and SiO₂ metallization schemes. Recently, copper is in a stage of replacing aluminum as the interconnecting metal in advanced microelectronic devices due to its higher conductivity. As such, plasma-polymerized thin films with low dielectric constant is developed to lower the signal delay in ultra-large-scale-integrated circuits (ULSIs).