In the generation of deep submicron semiconductor fabrication¡Atransmission delay is primarily caused by the parasitic resistance and capacitance (RC) in the multilevel interconnects. Besides¡Aelectromigration is also a serious issue for the reliability of devices . There are two principle methods of reducing the RC delay. The first method is to replace the Al wires with Cu interconnects which supply lower resistivity and high resistance to electromigration. The second method is to use a lower dielectric constant material as the inter-metal dielectric. But in Copper metallization¡Athe key issue of this technology is the formation of a thin barrier layer for Cu on the surface of the SiC film to prevent the absorption of water and diffusion of Cu. In this study¡Awe employed films SiC base compounds to investigate their chemical bonds, I-V characteristics comparisons with Al and Cu gate. On the other hand, because of serious C-V hysteretic phenomena, we try to analyze and build up models. There five models is reasonable for our experiment: (1) mobile ions, (2) dielectric polarization, (3) carrier injection, (4) gate-electrons injection, and (5) bound charges. They happens in different materials and structures.

As integrated circuits (ICs) are scaled down to deep submicron regime, interconnect delay becomes increasingly dominant over intrinsic gate delay. To solve the issue, two realistic methods are accepted popularly. On the one hand we use copper as the conductor for multilevel interconnects to decrease the resistance part of the RC delay. On the other hand we should reduce the coupling capacitance between the metal lines and this requires a low dielectric constant material. However, some difficulties come up in integrating low-k material with copper wires, including dielectric integrity and high diffusivity of copper ions. In order to prevent copper from penetrating into dielectric material under high electric fields and operation temperature, barrier dielectric have been developed to enhance resistance against copper drift. Silicon carbide (SixCy) with lower dielectric constant (k=4~5) is a promising barrier dielectric material to replace typically used silicon nitride (SixNy), (k~8). In this thesis, we will discuss the basic material properties of silicon carbide and the issues which will meet in process integration and actual working such as thermal cycles and operating under an electric field and a high temperature environment simultaneously. We investigated the conduction mechanism of the leakage current and tried to extract the physical parameters among it. In addition, the electrical properties of Silicon carbide at low temperature were also an important part of our research. Finally, we proposed some reasonable models to demonstrate the phenomenon and results we observed.