With the new recycling process, ruthenium precursors that are disposed of without being collected as valuable resources, can now be collected, refined, and re-used without returning them to ruthenium metal for use in semiconductor miniaturization technology.
The recycling process includes a recovery system developed by Tokyo Electron to collect residue of the ruthenium-CVD precursor not deposited on the wafer, and another process developed by Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo to refine and re-use the collected ruthenium precursors.
The process has also been designed to improve the copper filling performance in a narrow interconnect as part of the semiconductor fabrication by utilizing a ruthenium liner film with excellent adhesion and lower resistivity.
The utilization of the jointly developed recycling method is expected to save almost 20% of ruthenium precursor cost and lower the CoC of the CVD-ruthenium process, while reducing CO2 emissions by almost 30%.
