Abstract: A composite hard mask is disclosed. In some embodiments, a first sacrificial hard mask layer comprising an amorphous carbon or silicon nitride and a second sacrificial hard mask layer comprising a silicon nitride, silicon oxide, metal, metal oxide, or metal nitride, wherein the first and second sacrificial hard mask layers are not made of the same material.

Abstract: A novel polisher for chemical mechanical planarization process is described. The polisher design can have many variations. For process development and consumable evaluation, the CMP process can be performed on a single die or a section of the wafer. The size of testing wafer can be as small as 2? and as large as 18?. Furthermore, several variations can characterize the slurry for their static etch rate, dynamic etch rate, material removal rate, and viscosity in a single experiment. For production level wafer processing, Chemical Mechanical Polishing of all dies on the wafer surface is achieved by using multi-armed polishing heads or a single polishing head with small piece of a pad at the bottom of the head. The within wafer uniformity can be easily controlled and the equipment can be easily scaled up or down. This inventive design may translate to significant cost reduction for wafer processing at production level as well as evaluation of consumables at research and development level.