Enabling layer transfer and back-side power delivery network applications by wafer bonding and scanner correction optimizations (2023)

Apart from the ever-continuing lateral scaling in the xy-plane to increase the transistor density, additional new concepts find their way to the semiconductor industry too. These concepts are based on making more use of the third dimension. One relatively simple idea would be to create a second layer of transistors to double the transistor density. However, the material requirements are high and the quality of the layer deposition by conventional Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) techniques is insufficient. Another application to free up real estate, enabling a smaller cell size and hence an increased transistor density, is to power-up the transistors from the backside. The power rails for logic devices are historically defined in the first Metal layer and consume quite some space. Bringing the power rails to the backside will free up space. However, access to the transistor layer from the backside of the wafer is far from trivial due to the presence of a 775-μm thick silicon substrate. The answer to the challenges mentioned above is wafer-to-wafer direct bonding. Although this technique is not new and already widely used in the semiconductor industry to manufacture CMOS Image Sensors (CIS), it currently finds its way to the high-end logic markets. In case of layer transfer, a crystalline silicon layer is created by bonding a Silicon-On- Insulator (SOI) wafer to the already existing device wafer. After the bonding step, the substrate of the SOI wafer will be removed leaving the crystalline silicon layer behind. Access to the transistor layer from the wafer backside can be enabled by wafer-to-wafer bonding as well. To this end, a completed device wafer will be bonded to an (un-patterned) carrier wafer. The substrate of the original device wafer will be removed, enabling access from the backside. Wafer-towafer bonding applications can only be enabled in case the induced wafer deformations are low or when they can easily be corrected during the subsequent exposures on the scanner. At CEA-Leti, a dedicated test vehicle process flow has been developed to characterize the wafer bonding-induced distortion fingerprints for both the layer transfer and the backside power delivery network applications. The wafer process flow has been simplified without losing the industry relevant on-product overlay challenges. Wafers have been created to enable an extremely dense characterization of the wafer bonding induced fingerprint. The methodology we applied enables us to isolate the wafer bonding induced distortion fingerprint, something that is difficult to do in a production environment. The Back-Side Power Delivery Network (BS-PDN) application is the most challenging one. The initial raw measured wafer distortion fingerprints are around 60 to 80-nm. These numbers can already be easily brought down by scanner corrections to ~15-nm (mean+3σ) without too much effort. However, these numbers are too large for the 2-nm technology node and beyond, and further improvement is required. The goal of this paper is to present the path forward to bring the bonding induced wafer distortion levels to 10-nm and below. We show the capability of the latest and greatest EVG bonding tool hardware and recipe settings available at the time of running the experiments in combination with the correction capability an ASML 0.33NA scanner.