Plasma inducted wafer arcing in back-end process and the impact on reliability

Abstract

Wafer arcing is a commonly existed phenomenon, leading to wafer yield loss and reliability failure. By removing contact process, we found arcing frequency increase sharply and behave repeatedly; furthermore, we found seal ring of chip would cause wafer edge metal stressed and had reliability problem for the first time. Subsequently, the methods to reduce the arcing frequency and improve reliability were then studied.