No abstract

No abstract

We propose an atomic simulation techniques to understand the chemical-mechanical relationship of amorphous/porous silica based low-dielectric (low-k) material (SiOC(H)). The mechanical stiffness of the lowk material is a critical issue for the reliability performance of the IC backend structures. Due to the amorphous nature of the low-k material which has till now unknown molecular strucure, a novel algorithm is required to generate the molecular structure. The molecular dynamics (MD) mehtod is used as the simulation tool. Moreover, to understand the variation of the mechanical stiffness and density by the chemical configuration, sensitivity analyses have been performed. A fitting equation based on homogenization theory is established to represent the MD simulation results. The trends which are indicated by the simulation results exhibit good agreements with experiments from literature. Moreover, the simulation results indicate that the slight variation of the chemical configuration can induce significant change of the mechanical stiffness (over 80%) but not the density.