Engineering the extendibility of Cu/low-k BEOL technology

Copper dual damascene BEOL technology has been in production now for 14 years and 7 CMOS generations, since it shipped in its first chips in late 1997, and was first ramped to high volume production in mid-1998. Besides benefits in performance and manufacturability, perhaps the main benefit has been to keep the door open for continued Moore's Law scaling of on-chip wiring, where Al(Cu)-based wires could not have extended - either for fine line current densities and reliability, or multilevel hierarchical scaling for large/thick lines to help circumvent the RC scaling crisis.