Abstract
An original pad conditioner was developed to obtain uniform pad conditioning in CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing). The developed conditioner is composed of a lot of bundles of fine metal fibers. The configuration makes it finer to scrape off the pad by conditioning and keeps contact force of fiber edge constant with the sufficient bending stiffness. The original method to evaluate conditioning uniformity quantitatively was demonstrated with measuring color variation using the pad dyed continuously in depth. The developed conditioner obtained uniform conditioning performance of 8.0% non-uniformity within a pad, compared with 48.8% non-uniformity obtained by the traditional disk type of conditioner. The uniform conditioning performance leads to pad break-in process contraction and removal rate stability. In addition, it is easy for the conditioner to partly exchange bundles of metal fibers because of height margin to attach the bundles. Consequently, the range of removal rate fluctuation became small in accordance with exchanging the conditioner partly.
