Challenges of Aluminum RIE Technology at sub 0.45 μm Pitches

Abstract

Aluminum based wiring is common in the back-end-of-line (BEOL) metallization of DRAM chips. The 256 Mb DRAM chips necessitate the fabrication of wires at minimum pitch especially when stitched architecture is used. The critical topics related to extending aluminum interconnects by reactive ion etch (RIE) technology are discussed in this paper.