摘要
Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) is commonly used in semiconductor fabrication for flattening wafer surfaces. The study uses 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate slurry flow dynamics during CMP in a wafer-to-pad zone. Three fluids, used slurry, tracer and fresh incoming slurry, are marked in a wafer-to-pad zone to reveal the fluid dynamics influenced by the operational parameters including pad speed of 30–120 RPM, wafer speed of 30–120 RPM, pad to wafer center-to-center distance of 100–200 mm and wafer size of 100–200 mm and pad size of 610 mm. After validation, the computational model is applied to investigate slurry flow fields with comprehensive operational conditions that were not previously studied but are of significant concern in energy saving and CMP process yields.