The effects of microstructure on the electromigration of aluminum-1% silicon and titanium/aluminum-silicon films were studied using a new reactive ion etching/scanning electron microscopy technique. We found that the number of intersecting Al grain boundaries, called ‘‘triple points,’’ in the metal line plays an important role in determining the median-time-to-fail (MTTF) of the electromigration distribution. Our data shows that the electromigration MTTF increases by 6× or 8× when the number of triple points decreases by 3× or 5× on Al-Si or Ti/Al-Si metallization, respectively.

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An improved silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFET transistor structure is presented. The structure. retains the density and lowcapacitance advantages of SOI, but places the transistor channel region in the single-crystal silicon substrate. This "seeded-channel" configuration avoids floating-body effects and ensures that defects in the SO1 will not affect the channel mobility. The technology has been used to successfully fabricate n-channel transistors.