Surface and Grain-boundary Effects in Copper interconnects Thin Films Modeling with an Atomistic Basis

Abstract

As interconnects become smaller, their conductivity increases along with the parasitic effects in MOSFET technologies [1] Therefore, investigating how to model the scattering effects on the nanoscale is important to determine how to engineer interconnects toreduce those parasitic effects. In this work, a fully atomistic method is studied to model the electronic transport properties of copper thin films. For this purpose, a tight binding basis previously benchmarked against first principles calculations [2] is used todescribe surface roughness and grain boundary effects on comparablepper thin films with a thickness comparable to the values suggested by ITRS roadmap [3]. In contrast with traditional models, the results show that the tight binding method can quantify those scattering effects at low temperature without fitting any experimental parameters [4], [5].