Performance evaluation method of chemical mechanical polishing pad conditioner using digital image correlation processing

In chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), conditioning is generally used for the regeneration of the pad surface texture. Currently, the performance evaluation of conditioners depends on the user's experience so that it is important to develop a novel quantitative evaluation method for conditioner performance. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation method for conditioner performance using digital image correlation (DIC) processing. The proposed method can measure the in-plane micro-deformation distribution of the pad surface texture by conditioning. It is found that a pad surface deforms over 40 μm with conditioning and that the in-plane deformation value increases with a decrease in the mesh size of conditioner grains.