Low k Dielectric Materials from Inorganic-Organic Hybrids

The continuing miniaturization of feature sizes in integrated circuits (IC) has led to significantly improved device performance and higher packing densities. When feature sizes are reduced beyond 0.18 mum however, hundreds of millions of transistors are assembled on a single chip, leading to the increase of RC delay, power consumption and wire cross-talk between multilevel interconnects. As the signal delay from the interconnect becomes the limitation of chip performance and reliability (Ryan and Fox 2000), new materials must be discovered for metal wires and interlayer dielectrics (ILD). Higher performance devices could be achieved with the introduction of copper as a low resistivity conductor and new low dielectric constant (k) materials (preferably k