Effects of substrate temperature on electrical and.pdfVIP

ARTICLE IN PRESS Microelectronics Journal 37 (2006) 930–937 /locate/mejo Effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of copper thin films Kah-Yoong Chan, Teck-Yong Tou, Bee-San Teo Thin Film Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, Jalan Multimedia, 63100 Cyberjaya, Selangor, Malaysia Received 20 November 2005; accepted 29 January 2006 Available online 29 March 2006 Abstract This paper addresses the effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of dc magnetron sputter-deposited copper (Cu) thin films on p-type silicon. Copper films of 80 and 500 nm were deposited from Cu target in argon ambient gas pressure of 3.6 mTorr at different substrate temperatures ranging from room temperature to 250 1C. The electrical and structural properties of the Cu films were investigated by four-point probe and atomic force microscopy. Results from our experiment show that the increase in substrate temperature generally promotes the grain growth of the Cu films of both thicknesses. The RMS roughness as well as the lateral feature size increase with the substrate temperature, which is associated with the increase in the grain size. On the other hand, the resistivity for 80 nm Cu film decreases to less than 5 mO-cm at the substrate temperature of 100 1C, and further increase in the substrate temperature has not significantly decreased the film resistivity. For the 500 nm Cu films, the increase in the grain size with the substrate temperature does