Synergetic effect of vacuum-plasma and solution-colloidal seeding process for the fabrication of nanostructured barrier layers

A vacuum-plasma surface pre-treatment was incorporated into a previously developed solution (SC1)-colloidal seeding process for the electroless plating of nanostructured barrier layers on the SiO2 and Black Diamond™ dielectric layers that are used in ultralarge scale integrated circuits. The synergetic effect of the vacuum-plasma and subsequent SC1 treatments is to modify both of the dielectric surfaces into hydroxyl-terminated and related superhydrophilic bonds, thereby significantly increasing (by 20-fold) the population density of metallic seeds that have sizes of only ∼4 nm. With these densely populated, refined seeds, nanostructured barrier layers of a thickness of 10 nm, which were previously unachievable, were fabricated.