Along with its move to use 12-inch wafers announced earlier this week (CI No 3,679), Intel Corp announced its plans to implement its first chips using copper metallization. Only last year (CI No 3,467) Intel was saying that it didn’t see a short-term benefit in moving to copper until the design process and tools were all in place. Now it says the first copper chips will roll off its Hillsboro, Oregon production line in 2001, initially using 0.13 micron technology on 200m wafers. The 12-inch, 300m wafers will follow around a year later.
Intel has lagged behind IBM Corp (which pioneered the technology) and Motorola Inc on the use of copper in chips. Copper offers lower resistance and therefore more efficiency than current aluminum process chips.
Motorola Inc recently claimed another breakthrough, integrating copper with porous low-k dielectric films using multilevel fabrication of interconnects, which it says further reduce capacitance in integrated circuits, and results in an explosive speed improvement. Motorola says the integration of copper and porous low-k, once thought unachievable, will be applied to microprocessors, Fast Static RAMs and microcontroller cores, particularly those aimed at devices needing both high performance and low power, such as wireless and portable devices.
Motorola demonstrated its technology at the 1999 Spring Meeting of the Materials Research Society last month. Motorola has used its copper process technology for products including the PowerPC chip its SRAM memory chips. Copper and porous low-k integrated chips could be powering devices from Motorola in the 2002-2003 timeframe, it says.
