Study on Fundamental Pad Conditioning Mechanism for Chemical Mechanical Polishing (2nd report)

The novel conditioner was developed for uniform conditioning across a pad. The conditioner is composed by bendable fibers. Therefore, each abrasive conforms independently to the pad surface, differently from the traditional conditioner of plate type. The removal rate using the developed conditioner is equal to that using the traditional conditioner. However, the cut rate of pad using the developed one is tenth part of the cut rate using traditional one. Therefore, it was demonstrated that the developed conditioner realized more efficient conditioning. In addition, in order to evaluate the conditioning non-uniformity effectively, novel uniformity evaluation method was developed. The principle uses color variation by abrading the pad dyed on the surface. As the result, the conditioning non-uniformity was 8.3% with the developed conditioner, compared with 23.8% with the traditional conditioner