Comparative study on the effect of misalignment on bordered and borderless contacts

Abstract

Continued shrinking of feature sizes in integrated circuits has raised increasing reliability concern. In order to achieve higher packing density, interconnects are migrating toward borderless contacts and vias. The penalty with the absence of metal extension, however, is the decrease in electromigration lifetimes. The issue is particularly critical when there is a misalignment between the contact and metal line, which may occur due to process variability. In this paper, we studied the effect of misalignment on the electromigration lifetimes for bordered and borderless contacts. We found that the misalignment effect becomes more pronounced in borderless contacts. We also studied the case of multiple contact configuration. The results indicate that electromigration lifetimes increase with increasing number of contacts in series. The experimental data is consistent with finite element modeling results.