A new damascene architecture for high-performance metal-insulator-metal capacitors integration

As high-performance metal-insulator-metal capacitors are required for new technologies, an innovative architecture was developed with standard damascene processes used for copper interconnect realization. Low-cost damascene capacitors were integrated with thin Si3N4 films, leading to 2.9 fF/mum(2) capacitance values and low leakage currents, demonstrating this architecture ability to reduce the insulators thickness, thus achieving high-performance passive implementation for mixed integrated circuits. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.