Characterization of PVD Aluminum Nitride for Heat Spreading in RF ICs

L. La Spina, L. K. Nanver, and H. Schellevis

Laboratory of Electronic Components, Technology & Materials (ECTM), DIMES Delft University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands Email: l.laspina@tudelft.nl
AbstractPhysical-vapor-deposited aluminum nitride, developed for heat spreading in RF ICs, is characterized by fabricating and measuring several different types of test structures. Among other things, it is shown that the material is a good dielectric insulator and has suitably low mechanical stress and piezoelectric response. With layers as thick as 6 m, the electrothermal instabilities in a silicon-on-glass bipolar process are drastically reduced.

E. Iborra, M. Clement, and J. Olivares

Group of Microsystems and Electronic Materials Universidad Politcnica de Madrid Madrid, Spain

micron thick layers as heat spreaders are also verified by measurement of the thermal resistance of individual transistors as well as the mutual thermal coupling resistance of transistor pairs. II. ALUMINUM NITRIDE DEPOSITION Thin films of PVD AlN are deposited at a pressure of 5 mtorr, using a pure Al target. Nitrogen incorporation is achieved with a N2 flow of 75 standard cubic centimeters per minute (sccm) and argon flow of 38 sccm. The stress exerted by the AlN layers can be manipulated by varying different parameters. When a pulsed-DC power of 2 kW with a pulse width of 1616 ns is used, a layer of 800 nm will have a tensile stress of about 400 MPa. With the same processing parameters and the addition of a 20 W RF biasing, a compressive stress of about 500 MPa is obtained. Thus, to reduce the stress of micron thick layers of AlN, they are built up as a stack of alternating 0.2-m-thick layers, the one deposited by pulsed DC-sputtering and the other with the addition of RF biasing. With this technique it has been possible to deposit up to 6-mthick layers that have small enough stress to allow reliable integration in the silicon-on-glass process. III. ALUMINUM NITRIDE PROPERTIES

I.

INTRODUCTION

The thermal management of silicon ICs is becoming a crucial issue. Particularly in SOI and substrate transfer processes, the separation of the devices from the thermally conductive Si substrate seriously aggravates the matter. Substrate transfer processes are particularly interesting for RF applications because losses and cross-talk via the substrate can be eliminated [1]. However, the aggressive electrical isolation of the Si devices with materials such as SiO2 and SiNx can also lead to a very high thermal resistance. This has been demonstrated in the silicon-on-glass substrate transfer process described in [2]. In [3] a physical-vapor-deposited (PVD) low-stress aluminum nitride (AlN) layer was developed and it was shown that the basic material properties were suitable for integration as a heat spreader in the siliconon-glass process. In the present work, the qualities of the AlN layers are examined thoroughly, especially with respect to their DC and RF electrical properties. AlN is a III-V material that is receiving more and more attention due to its dielectric, optical, thermal, acoustic, and piezoelectric properties. Moreover, it is compatible with standard silicon technology. It has a large energy band-gap, which makes it suitable as an insulator in many situations. This aspect is studied here for a wide range of layer thicknesses. On the other hand, piezoelectric behavior is undesirable in an RF circuit environment and therefore the AlN layers have also been characterized with respect to this property. Besides substantiating that PVD AlN can be an electrically reliable material, the benefits of applying several

A. Structural Properties The crystal quality of the samples was assessed by measuring the X-ray diffraction /2 patterns. Rocking-curves around the 0002 AlN reflection [18.02 ()] were measured as well; they were fitted by Gaussian curves to deduce their fullwidth-at-half-maximum (FWHM). All the films analyzed show a high degree of c-axis orientation although some vestiges of other orientations (<101>, <102>, and <103>) are always present in the XRD patterns. The data indicates the existence of two kinds of grains, the one with the c-axis perpendicular to the substrate surface and the other with a tilted c-axis. For films with a comparable amount of tilted grains, the FWHM of the rocking curve of the 002 reflection (corresponding to the caxis oriented grains) becomes narrower as the film gets thicker,

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which is a well-known effect in sputtered AlN layers [4]. On the contrary, the FWHM of the 002 reflection becomes wider as the amount of tilted grains increases. The crystal quality also depends on the kind of substrate and is better if the AlN film is deposited on bare silicon rather than oxidized silicon. The difference between highly-oriented films and those with a large amount of tilted grains can also be monitored by atomic-force microscopy (AFM) analysis. In Fig. 1 AFM images recorded in contact mode are shown for a 200 nm and a 2 m thick film, respectively. The thin film displays the image typical of c-axis oriented films with the basal projection of the grains being observed. For the thick film the presence of tilted grains is evident. The roughness of the thin film is also lower than that of the thick film.
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The dielectric constant of AlN has been extracted from C-V measurements: it falls in the range 911.5 for the examined AlN thicknesses. The behavior of AlN at microwave frequencies has been studied by fabricating 1.4 m thick Al CPWs on surfacepassivated high-resistivity substrates (~ 4000 cm) [6]. In Fig. 3 the measured losses up to 30 GHz are shown for five different samples: (a) is for a CPW fabricated on 330 nm silicon dioxide, (b) and (c) are for CPWs on a layer of AlN deposited directly on either the silicon substrate or on a thin 30nm-thick layer of thermally grown SiO2, respectively, and (d), (e), and (f) are for CPWs as (a) but with an AlN layer deposited on top of the Al of the CPW. The results show that the presence of AlN does not introduce additional losses at high frequency. In fact, adding AlN has reduced the losses. C. Piezoelectric and Mechanical Properties To evaluate the piezoelectric activity of the films, SAW devices were fabricated by depositing metallic interdigital transducers on top of the AlN. The scattering parameters Sij, measured with a network analyzer, were fitted using a specially developed simulation model [7] to obtain accurate values of the electromechanical coupling factor (k312) of the piezoelectric material that do not depend on the stray elements of the devices. Several samples have been measured with AlN thicknesses from 20 nm to 2 m directly deposited either on the silicon substrate or on a 30-nm-thick thermally grown silicon dioxide. As expected, films with a great amount of tilted grains show negligible piezoelectric response [8], whereas films with reasonably good crystal quality shows a piezoelectric response varying in a wide range: values of k312 ranged from 0.1% to 1% were found in films with similar characteristics. A possible explanation for this behavior is that the method of deposition based on the alternation of layers grown with and without substrate RF bias favors the growth of grains with opposite polarities that reduce the overall piezoelectric response in an uncontrolled way. The measurement of the curvature of the wafer before and after the AlN deposition allows an estimate of the in-plane residual stress by using Stoneys equation. The measurements on wafers with a 2-m-thick AlN layer reveal a tensile residual stress of about 400 MPa if the aluminum nitride is deposited on silicon. However, this value is lower when the AlN film is deposited on a thin silicon dioxide layer. D. Optical Properties The refractive index has been measured at different wavelengths (from 350 to 650 nm) on the Sopra ES4G ellipsometer for a sample with 800-nm-thick AlN layer. The refractive index is between 2.1 and 2.2, in agreement with the results given in [9], [10]. Infrared reflectance was measured from 4000 cm-1 to 400 cm-1 in addition to the typical interferences used for calculation of the film thickness. The restrahlen band zone was analyzed to corroborate the structural data obtained from XRD. In particular, the films with tilted grains showed two characteristic modes of vibration, the A1(LO) at 890 cm-1 due

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(b)

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Figure 1. AFM images of AlN films of (a) 200 nm and (b) 2 m thick.

B. Electrical Properties Current-voltage (I-V) measurements were performed on a Cascade probe station with an HP4156C parameter analyzer, and capacitance-voltage (C-V) results are obtained with an HP4284A Precision LCR-meter operating up to 1 MHz. Measurements on coplanar waveguides (CPW) are performed on a calibrated Cascade Microtech station using a HP8510C Network Analyzer; the probe is a coplanar ground-signalground HF probe with a 100 m pitch. The electrical resistivity of AlN layers of various thicknesses has been extracted from I-V measurements of aluminum-AlN-silicon capacitors. The results are summarized in Fig. 2. Below a thickness of 100 nm the resistivity is high but very thickness dependent. At 100 nm, values above ~ 1012 cm are obtained after which the resistivity increases with film thickness, reaching about 1013 cm for the 300 nm case. For comparison it can be noted that the dc resistivity of the most deposited materials used in IC-technology, like silicon nitride and oxide, is in the order of 1014 cm [5].

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to grains with the c-axis perpendicular to the substrate, and a quasi-LO mode combination of the A1(LO) and E1(LO) at 910 cm-1 due to the presence of tilted grains. A description of these assignments can be found elsewhere [11].

IV.

ALN HEAT SPREADERS IN SILICON-ON-GLASS BIPOLAR TRANSISTORS

Figure 2. Resistivity as a function of thickness for different values of the voltage applied to the test structure.

Figure 3. Measured microwave losses for 5 different CPWs: (a) CPW on 330 nm SiO2; (b) CPW on 200 nm AlN deposited directly on the silicon substrate; (c) CPW on 200 nm AlN deposited on 30 nm SiO2; (d) 2 m AlN, (e) 4 m AlN, and (f) 6 m AlN deposited on a CPW as in (a).

E. Thermal Properties It is well known that the thermal conductivity of thin films can deviate strongly from that of the corresponding bulk material. The AlN has a theoretical thermal conductivity kTH of 320 Wm-1K-1 [12], while the maximum experimental value for the bulk material is 270 Wm-1K-1 [13]. However, the kTH of AlN films can be much lower, depending on the deposition process details, grain size and shape, film thickness and impurity concentration. The lateral (in-plane) thermal conductivity of our AlN layers has been measured to be about 12 W/mK [14]. This is lower than suggested by the electrothermal device measurements discussed below. It is probable that the vertical thermal conductivity is higher than the lateral one due to the columnar growth of the material during sputtering. Thus there may be a reduced phonon scattering on the grains boundaries in the vertical direction.

PVD AlN is deposited directly on the first metal layer of NPN silicon-on-glass bipolar transistors in the manner described in [3]. The results reported in the following are for BJTs made in a silicon island of 12250.94 m3. In Fig. 4 measurements are shown of the collector current as a function of the base-emitter voltage. The beneficial effect of the AlN layer for reducing the electrothermal feedback is increased as the layer thickness is increased. The values of thermal resistances are extracted by determining the point of onset of thermal instability, i.e., the starting point of negative differential resistance (also referred as flyback or snapback) [15], and results are given in Table I. The measurements have been compared with simulations based on analytical solutions of a system of non-linear algebraic equations that describe the BJT [16]. This model accounts for all the relevant phenomena needed for an electrothermal analysis [15], [17]. The model parameters were adjusted by using the characteristics of the transistor measured in isothermal conditions at various temperatures. Also shown in Fig. 4 are the simulation values of temperature increase above ambient, which further underlines the cooling provided by the AlN heat spreaders. A 6-m-thick AlN (device D in Table I) produces a very significant reduction of the thermal resistance of more than 85%. An important function of heat spreaders is to keep critical devices in a circuit at the same temperature. This function of the AlN has been investigated here by measuring two identical NPN BJTs where the emitters are 42.5 m apart and are separated by otherwise thermally isolating materials. When such a pair is operated in parallel it can suffer from electrothermal instabilities that lead to current hogging by the one transistors while the other switches off [18], [19]. In Fig. 5 the measured collector currents are shown for an NPN pair with and without a 4-m-thick AlN layer. Also in this case the experiments are compared with simulations using values of 17800 and 2200 K/W, respectively, for the selfheating resistance RTH and the thermal coupling coefficient RM for the non-cooled pair, and 5000 and 1000 K/W for the pair cooled with 4 m AlN. For the latter pair the onset of thermal instability is shifted to a higher value of the dissipated power. V. CONCLUSIONS

The PVD AlN developed in this work was found to be very suitable for integration as heat spreader in RF IC processes both with respect to the electrical isolation properties (measured up to 30 GHz) as well as the electromechanical properties. Both mechanical stress and piezoelectrical effects were effectively suppressed by alternating the growth conditions every 0.2 m. In this way a suitable mixture of AlN grain sizes and orientation were achieved, which made it possible to reliably integrate layers up to 6 m thick. The thicker the AlN is, the more efficient the cooling of the devices. In silicon-on-glass BJTs, a 6 m thick layer deposited

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before wafer transfer to glass gave a reduction of the NPN thermal resistance of more than 85%, bringing it down to about 2500 K/W. This value is typical of many of todays processes [20]-[22]. Adding AlN layers onto the back of the silicon-onglass devices after wafer transfer would bring the RTH down even further. However, this does have the drawback of making it necessary to pattern contact windows through the AlN to the last metallization layer. On the other hand, it also opens the attractive option of being able to add copper heatsinks on a thick thermally conductive layer that is electrically insulating. TABLE I. THERMAL RESISTANCES EXTRACTED FROM TEST STRUCTURES WITH DIFFERENT THICKNESS OF ALN LAYER DEPOSITED ON THE FRONT-WAFER
Device A B C D tAlN [m] 0 0.8 4 6 RTH [K/W] 19000 9000 5250 2500 Benefit compared to Device A [%] / 53 72 87

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the DIMES-ICP cleanroom/measurement-room staff. Moreover, they wish to thank Siddharth Panwar and Fabio Santagata for their assistance during experiments. REFERENCES
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[8] [9] [10] [11] [12] Figure 4. Collector current IC and increment of temperature above ambient T as a function of the base-emitter voltage for an NPN covered with AlN layers of different thicknesses tAlN. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]

Figure 5. Measured (solid lines) and simulated (dashed lines) collector currents of the individual transistors of a pair operated in parallel as a function of the total collector current for the reference device and a device with a 4-m-thick layer of AlN.

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