Appendix: Glossary

A

Agglomeration

A morphological degradation of microstructure in polycrystalline materials, driven by surface/grain boundary energy reduction, resulting in disintegration of microstructure through grain boundary grooving and islanding.

Amorphous silicide

A metastable titanium silicide phase which can be formed by annealing a Ti/Si (crystalline or amorphous) bilayer at low temperatures. It can be stable up to ~ 500 C.

B

Backscattering spectrometry

Measurement of energy of backscattered ions.

C

Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD)

A most common thin film deposition method in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. The process involves the introduction of materials in gaseous vapour form into an air-tight deposition chamber. The gas vapours chemically react with an underling substrate (silicon wafer) and form or deposit a solid thin film onto the substrate. It has been widely used to deposit films of semiconductors (crystalline and non-crystalline), insulators as well as metals.

Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS)

A key device in state-of-the-art silicon microelectronics, which uses both N-type and P-type transistors to realise logic function. The main advantage of CMOS over NMOS and bipolar technology is the much smaller power consumption and dissipation. Today, CMOS technology is the dominant semiconductor technology for microprocessors, memories and application specific integrated circuits.

Copper Damascene

The name of the copper interconnect formation process for advanced ULSI. The surface of the interlayer dielectric film is patterned by standard photolithography and reactive ion etching, copper is deposited into the recessed trench by electroplating, and excess copper is removed by chemical mechanical polishing. Consequently, low-resistivity inlaid copper metal interconnect...