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The Effect of Variability Among Grain Boundary Energies on Grain Growth in Thin Film Strips

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2011

H.J. Frost ,
Y. Hayashi ,
C.V. Thompson  and
D.T. Walton
H.J. Frost
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
Y. Hayashi
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 NEC Corporation, ULSI Research Laboratory, 1120 Shimokuzawa, Kanagawa 229, Japan
C.V. Thompson
Affiliation:
M.I.T., Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
D.T. Walton
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 Digital Equipment Corporation, 75 Reed Road, Hudson, Massachusetts 01749
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Abstract

Grain growth in thin-film strips is important to interconnect reliability because grain boundary structures strongly effect the rate and mechanism of electromigration-induced failure. Previous simulations of this process have indicated that the transformation to the fully bamboo structure proceeds at a rate which decreases exponentially with time, and which is inversely proportional to the square of the strip width. We have also reported that grain boundary pinning due to surface grooving implies that there exists a maximum strip width to thickness ratio beyond which the transformation to the bamboo structure does not proceed to completion. In this work we have extended our simulation of grain growth in thin films and thin film strips to consider the effects of variations in grain boundary energy. Boundary energy is taken to depend on the misorientation between the two neighboring grain and the resulting variations in grain boundary energy mean that dihedral angles at triple junctions deviate from 120°. The proportionality between boundary velocities and local curvatures, and the critical curvature for boundary pinning due to surface grooving also both depend on boundary energy. In the case of thin-film strips, the effect of boundary energy variability is to impede the transformation to the bamboo structure, and reduce the width above which the complete bamboo structure is never reached. Those boundaries which do remain upon stagnation tend to be of low energy (low misorientation angle) and are therefore probably of low diffusivity, so that their impact on reliability is probably reduced.

Type
Research Article
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 338: Symposium – Materials Reliability in Microelectronics IV , 1994 , 295
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 1994

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References

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