A Preliminary Model Accounting for the Suction Pressure in CMP Process

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) is a widely used technique to achieve high level of global and local planarity required in modern integrate circuit (IC) industries and hard disk manufacturing process, etc., which pleas for concentrate researches. The main purpose of the present research is in an attempt to express the counterintuitive experimental aftermath: the ‘negative’ pressure, i.e., a suction force occurred in conventional commercial CMP process. A preliminary two tiers wafer-scale flow model for CMP is presented considering the roughness as well as the elasticity of the bulk pad substrate. Numerical simulations were conducted to elucidate the contact pressure and flow pressure distributions. The results show that a divergence region appears near the leading edge, which contributes to the suction pressure. A stress-richened area near the edges will give rise to over polishing. The research aftermaths agree well with the experiments, that validate the proposed analysis to some extend. This will shed lights on the mechanism of CMP process, which for a long time is considered as a black art where empirical or semi-empirical data are dependent upon to optimize the CMP parameters.