Microwave Monitoring of Atmospheric Corrosion of Interconnects

Traditional metrology has been unable to adequately address the reliability needs of emerging integrated circuits at the nano scale; thus, new metrology and techniques are needed. In this paper, we use microwave propagation characteristics (insertion loss and dispersion) to study the atmospheric interconnect corrosion under accelerated stress conditions. The results presented in this work indicate that the corrosion resilience of the test device is limited by the thermal aging of the passivation layer.