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Strain-Induced Grain Growth during Rapid Thermal Cycling of Aluminum Interconnects

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Abstract

We demonstrate the rapid growth of grains in nonpassivated, sputtered Al-1 at. pct Si interconnects during 200 Hz thermal cycling induced by alternating current. Mean grain diameters were observed by use of automated electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to increase by more than 70 pct after an accumulated cycling time of less than 6 minutes over a temperature range of 200 °C, which corresponded to a total strain range of 4 × 10−3. Plasticity in growing grains primarily took the form of topography formation at the free surface and grain rotation, while consumed grains tended to retain relatively high dislocation content. Grain growth was characterized by means of pairwise comparisons in EBSD pattern quality across moving boundaries. Out of 92 cases where a grain was observed to grow into its neighbor, 61 cases indicated that the growing grain had a higher average pattern quality factor than that of the consumed grain, at the 95 pct confidence level. The results are consistent with a strain-induced boundary migration mechanism, wherein stored plastic strain energy differences from grain to grain drive growth, some of which was observed after only 10 seconds of cycling.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the NIST Office of Microelectronics Programs and the National Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Program for support. We thank D.S. Finch (AISthesis, LLC) for preparation of TEM specimens by FIB. This work is a contribution of the United States Department of Commerce and is not subject to copyright in the United States.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Materials Reliability Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, 80305, USA

    R.R. Keller (Group Leader), R.H. Geiss (NIST Affiliate), N. Barbosa III (Research Engineer), A.J. Slifka (Research Engineer) & D.T. Read (Physicist)

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  1. R.R. Keller
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  2. R.H. Geiss
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  3. N. Barbosa III
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  4. A.J. Slifka
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  5. D.T. Read
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Correspondence to R.R. Keller.

Additional information

This article is based on a presentation given in the symposium entitled “Deformation and Fracture from Nano to Macro: A Symposium Honoring W. W. Gerberich's 70th Birthday” which occurred during the TMS Annual Meeting, March 12–16, 2006, in San Antonio, Texas and was sponsored by the Mechanical Behavior of Materials and Nanomechanical Behavior Committees of TMS.

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Keller, R., Geiss, R., Barbosa, N. et al. Strain-Induced Grain Growth during Rapid Thermal Cycling of Aluminum Interconnects. Metall Mater Trans A 38, 2263–2272 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11661-006-9017-1

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