IBM Corp’s announcement that it has created samples of chips using copper circuitry plus a new CMOS7 manufacturing process that will support the mass production of copper-based parts stirred a bevy of chipbuilders to declare their own metallization inclinations. IBM’s won’t be licensing its process to third parties, but PowerPC buddy Motorola Inc said that it’ll sample its own chips using copper in summer next year with first parts shipping in September 1998. It says it’s been working on a copper process for 2.5 years which it will detail at December’s International Electronic Devices Meeting and has a bunch of patents pending or granted. It says the 0.2 micron, six-layer process will produce chips drawing 1.8 volts incorporating between 50 million and 100 million transistors. Both IBM and Motorola are members of Sematech the Austin, Texas-based US Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology consortium semiconductor research consortium, which itself demonstrated the feasibility of using copper by producing sample parts (CI No 3,235). It’s not in the business of commercializing its work per se, its brief is to supply its member companies – including AMD, DEC, HP, Intel Corp, Lucent, Motorola Inc, Nat Semi, Rockwell and TI – with the fruits of its work enabling them to get products to market six to 12 months ahead of non-Sematech member companies. IBM says it shared high-level work on its technology with Sematech, enabling the consortium to produce a copper metalized wafer, but says most of the key back-end technologies it’s created for manufacturing the copper chips, including the tools and machines themselves, plus the unidentified material used to insulate the copper from the silicon substrate, were not made available to Sematech. Interference and lithography still to come – see separate story this section.
