Interfacial adhesion for microelectronics and MEMS devices

The reliability of thin film systems is important to the continued development of microelectronic and micro-electro-mechanical systems. Most often, reliability of these systems is tied to the ability of the films to remain adhered to its substrate. By measuring the amount of energy to separate the film, interfacial fracture energy, and prediciting trends researchers can predicts film lifetimes. Recent work to measure this energy has resulted in several different testing techniques including spontaneous buckling, indentation induced delamination and four point bending.; Literature has shown good agreement between delamination test methods, but only when energy dissipation into the substrate is minimized. Using a W/Si system, the effect of energy dissipation was shown to decrease from 0.6 J/m2 to 0.2 J/m2 between different methods; one where the only fracture was along the interface and the other where cracking also occurred in the film and substrate. For systems where fracture only occurs along the interface, such as Au/Si, the calculated fracture energies are identical if the energy put into the system is kept near the needed strain energy to cause delamination. Overlayers of different stresses and thickness on Au/Si showed that the adhesion energies could change by a factor of three (Chapter 3).; This dependence on applied energy is also shown when comparisons of four point bending and stressed overlayer test methods were completed on Pt/Si systems. The fracture energies of Pt/Ti/SiO2 were studied using four-point bending and compressive overlayers. Varying the thickness of the Ti film from 2 to 17 nm in a Pt/Ti/SiO2 system, both test methods showed an increase of adhesion energy until the nominal Ti thickness was 12nm. Then this adhesion energy began to decrease. This decrease was due to an increase in the Pt grain size after a nominal 12nm thickness (Chapter 4 and 5). While the trends in energy release rate are similar, the magnitude of the toughness between the test methods is not the same.; Both test methods were used to test both reliability of metal-dielectrcs and the adhesion between metal-polymers and metal-metal interfaces. In Au/Si interfaces, competing mechanisms of stress corrosion cracking and diffusion control the evolution of interface toughness (Chapter 6). A separate study of roughness using W/Si showed quantitatively that increasing the surface area fraction of the well adhered layers increases the interfacial fracture energy (Chapter 7). For polymer-metal interfaces, the control of surface contaminants affected adhesion much more than metal-dielectric interfaces (Chapter 8).