Abstract
We have carried out quantitative structure and property analysis of the nanoporous structures of low dielectric constant (low-k) carbon-doped silicon oxide (SiCOH) films, which were deposited with plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) using vinyltrimethylsilane (VTMS), divinyldimethylsilane (DVDMS), and tetravinylsilane (TVS) as precursor and oxygen as an oxidant gas. We found that the SiCOH film using VTMS only showed well defined spherical nanopores within the film after thermal annealing at $450^{\circ}C$ for 4 h. The average pore radius of the generated nanopores within VTMS SiCOH film was 1.21 nm with narrow size distribution of 0.2. It was noted that thermally labile $C_{x}H_{y}$ phase and Si-$CH_3$ was removed to make nanopore within the film by thermal annealing. Consequently, this induced that decrease of average electron density from 387 to $321\;nm^{-3}$ with increasing annealing temperature up to $450^{\circ}C$ and taking a longer annealing time up to 4 h. However, the other SiCOH films showed featureless scattering profiles irrespective of annealing conditions and the decreases of electron density were smaller than VTMS SiCOH film. Because, with more vinyl groups are introduced in original precursor molecule, films contain more organic phase with less volatile characteristic due to the crosslinking of vinyl groups. Collectively, the presenting findings show that the organosilane containing vinyl group was quite effective to deposit SiCOH/$C_{x}H_{y}$ dual phase films, and post annealing has an important role on generation of pores with the SiCOH film.
