This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is in the general area of materials chemistry and in the subfield of organometallic chemistry. The thrust of this activity is to experimentally test the feasibility of designing novel unimolecular source reagents that will enable the deposition of titanium nitride (TiN) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) at temperatures below 500 degrees C without contamination by chlorine, carbon, or particulates. TiN is rapidly becoming an important material as a barrier layer in very large scale integration (VLSI) direct random access memories (DRAMs), as an antireflection coating and as a "glue" layer between noble metals and silicon dioxide in both memory and logic devices. The TiN CVD precursors identified for evaluation represent a novel alternative to the present physical vapor deposition technology which, because of the high temperature required, is unsuitable for device fabrication as device features shrink to ultra large scale integration (ULSI) dimensions. In this size domain, CVD will be the manufacturing method of choice. Unfortunately, no TiN precursors presently exist that allow CVD of TiN at low temperatures without contamination problems. %%% In this SBIR Phase I research, Advanced Technology Materials should demonstrate the feasibility of the synthesis and utility of the proposed new unimolecular CVD source reagents for the low temperature, contaminant-free production of TiN. The successful identification of such precursors would allow for their demonstration in full scale memory device fabrication in Phase II and to be rapidly commercialized in Phase III.
