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Alternative Strategies May Supplant Low-k Materials Development for Future ICs The search for low-k materials to improve semiconductor interconnects may have reached certain practical limits, according to technologists at a recent conference sponsored by SEMATECH. Future work likely will focus less on new, ultra low-k materials, and more on enhancing improvements in process and design, conference participants indicated. Presenters at the SEMATECH Low-k Symposium, which attracted approximately 140 technologists to San Diego in late October, appeared to sustain SEMATECH's position that interconnect materials below 2.5 k-effective may be too expensive to develop and too difficult to work with to be economically practical for all design schemes.
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