At the IEEE IITC conference, imec and Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) presented a direct Cu etch scheme for patterning Cu interconnects. The new scheme has great potential to overcome resistivity and reliability issues that occur while scaling conventional Cu damascene interconnects for advanced nodes. Aggressive scaling of damascene Cu interconnects leads to a drastic increase in the resistivity of the Cu wires, due to the fact that grain size is limited by the damascene trenches, which results...