As we have seen throughout this book, material deposition and material removal are critical steps in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. A wide variety of materials, insulators, semiconductors and conductors must be deposited at various stages in chip manufacturing. Usually, these materials are deposited in blanket form covering the entire wafer surface, although there are some deposition methods which are selective and deposit materials only in specific locations on the wafer surface. We will discuss deposition methods in detail in Chapter 10. Selective removal of material is usually accomplished using a lithography-defined mask followed by etching. We will discuss a variety of etching methods in this chapter.
Material removal can also be accomplished using chemical–mechanical polishing (CMP). This process is usually not selective but uses a combination of chemical etching and mechanical polishing to remove materials. The original motivation for developing CMP was to planarize wafer surfaces in back-end structures, since the polishing produces a flat surface.
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