A copper hillock induced interconnect failure mechanism is presented. The copper hillock is frequently generated during a copper dual damascene process and hillock formation is found to degrade the interconnect integrity by affecting the following process steps. The copper hillock appears to damage the SiN capping layer and results in copper corrosion during via etch. The corrosion generates copper particles inside via holes and the defects are found to make the following metal depositions incomplete during via formation. Based on the observations, a copper hillock induced defect model is proposed and a new copper process is suggested to reduce copper hillocks. (c) 2007 The Electrochemical Society.