Integrated circuits provide an advantage of allowing interconnection of numerous circuits on a semiconductor substrate. Communication may be accomplished between the circuits or transistors within the integrated circuit in an efficient manner. However, integrated circuits have become increasingly complex with increasing numbers of components housed within a semiconductor device. As more circuits are packed into smaller spaces, multilevel interconnects increase in length and complexity accordingly. The resulting long and complicated multilevel interconnects may suffer from increased or unpredictable signal propagation delay. As the length and complexity of the interconnects become even more problematic with increasing circuits or transistors within the integrated circuit, device speed and performance begins to become impacted.
The use of certain Inter-Layer Dielectric (ILD) materials may provide some benefit in preserving device speed and performance in the face of complex interconnects. For example, the dielectric constant (k) of the ILD materials, which is a measure of the ability of the ILD material to hold charge, has been shown to have an effect on device speed and performance in semiconductor circuits. However, low-k ILD is also difficult and costly to apply, making the use of low-k ILD impractical in many cases.
Therefore, there exists a need to provide a semiconductor device in which signal propagation time is optimized or otherwise reduced and speed and performance of semiconductor devices on an integrated circuit are optimized or otherwise increased.