Interfacial adhesion of Cu to self-assembled monolayers on SiO2

As the critical feature size in microelectronic devices continues to decrease below 100 nm, new barrier materials of < 5 nm thickness are required. Recently we have shown that self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are attractive candidates that inhibit Cu diffusion into SiO2. For SAMs to be used as barriers in real applications, however, they must also promote adhesion at the Cu/dielectric interfaces. Here, we report preliminary quantitative measurements of interfacial adhesion energy and chemical binding energy of Cu/SiO2 interfaces treated with nitrogen-terminated SAMs. Amine-containing SAMs show a similar to10% higher adhesion energy with Cu, while interfaces with Cu-pyridine bonds actually show degraded adhesion, when compared with that of the reference Cu/SiN interface. However, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements show that Cu-pyridine and Cu-amine interactions have a factor-of-four higher binding energy than that of Cu-N bonds at Cu/SiN interfaces. The lack of correlation between adhesion and chemical binding energies is most likely due to incomplete coverage of SAMs.