Highly Scaled Ruthenium Interconnects

Abstract

Ruthenium has emerged as a promising candidate to substitute Cu as the interconnect metallization in future technology nodes. Here, we demonstrate area scaling of Ru wires down to cross-sectional areas of 33 nm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> through subtractive patterning by using a metal-spacer patterning technique. The wires were characterized by physical as well as electrical measurements and demonstrate low resistivity, between 20 and 35 μΩcm for cross-sectional areas between 175 and 33 nm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .