CRYSTALLINITY DEPENDENCE OF GRAIN AND GRAIN BOUNDARY STRENGTH OF A BICRYSTAL STRUCTURE OF COPPER

Electroplated copper thin films often contain porous grain boundaries and the volume ratio of porous grain boundaries in the copper thin films is much larger than that in bulk copper. Thus, the lifetime of the interconnection components fabricated by electroplating is strongly dominated by the strength of grain boundaries because final fracture caused by the acceleration of atomic diffusion during electromigration (EM) occurs at grain boundaries in polycrystalline interconnections. It is important, therefore, to quantitatively evaluate the grain boundary strength of electroplated copper films for estimating the lifetime of the interconnection in order to assure the product reliability. In this study, relationship between the strength and crystallinity of electroplated copper thin films was investigated experimentally and theoretically. In order to investigate the relationship between the strength and grain boundary quality, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were applied to analyze the deformation behavior of a bicrystal sample and its strength. The variation of the strength and deformation property were attributed to the higher defect density around grain boundaries.