Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is a manufacturing process used to remove or planarize metallic, dielectric, or barrier layers on silicon wafers. During polishing, a wafer is pressed against an elastic pad that is flooded with slurry. Prior work has shown that an asymmetrical, subambient pressure develops at the interface between the silicon and the pad during polishing. Since the slurry pressure is on the order of the wafer-on-pad contact stress, the total contact pressure is asymmetrical. This promotes a non-uniform polishing rate, since Preston's equation states that the material removal rate is proportional to the total contact pressure. In order to determine the total contact pressure, experiments were conducted to measure the two-dimensional fluid pressure. A superposition method was then employed to calculate the slurry film thickness by performing an equilibrium analysis of the forces and moments created by the fluid and solid interactions. The film thickness obtained by this method is used to model the slurry pressure using the polar Reynolds' equation. Modeling results qualitatively agree with experiments.