Porous silicas are promising candidates to replace dense silica for use as low dielectric constant (low-k) insulators in microprocessors. With amorphous porous silicas, the mechanical strength deteriorates rapidly with increasing porosity and creates significant concerns over the reliability of these materials under mechanical stresses imposed during the chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) and packaging processes. In this presentation, we summarize our recent works that show experimentally that pure-silica-zeolites (PSZs) have a remarkably higher mechanical strength than amorphous porous silicas at any given porosity or k value due to their crystalline structure, making them a likely dielectric material for enabling smaller feature sizes in future generation microprocessors.
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