mechanical properties of the wafer itself must be considered too. If the wafer has a slightly bowed structure, the pressure will be greater on the edges than it would on the center, which causes non-uniform polishing. In order to compensate for the wafer bow, pressure can be applied to the wafer's backside which, in turn, will equalize the centre-edge differences. The pads used in the CMP tool should be rigid in order to uniformly polish the wafer surface. However, these rigid pads must be kept in alignment with the wafer at all times. Therefore, real pads are often just stacks of soft and hard materials that conform to wafer topography to some extent. Generally, these pads are made from porous polymeric materials with a pore size between 30-50 μm, and because they are consumed in the process, they must be regularly reconditioned. In most cases the pads are very much proprietary, and are usually referred to by their trademark names rather than their chemical or other properties. Chemical action Chemical mechanical polishing or planarization is a process of smoothing surfaces with the combination of chemical and mechanical forces. It can be thought of as a hybrid of chemical etching and free abrasive polishing. Usage in semiconductor fabrication Before about 1990 CMP was viewed as too "dirty" to be included in high-precision fabrication processes, since abrasion tends to create particles and the abrasives themselves are not without impurities. Since that time, the integrated circuit industry has moved from aluminum to copper conductors. This required the development of an additive patterning process, which relies on the unique abilities of CMP to remove material in a planar and uniform fashion and to stop repeatably at the interface between copper and oxide insulating layers (see Copper interconnects for details). Adoption of this process has made CMP processing much more widespread. In addition to aluminum and copper, CMP processes have been developed for polishing tungsten, silicon dioxide, and (recently) carbon nanotubes. Limitations There are currently several limitations of CMP that appear during the polishing process requiring optimization of a new technology. In particular, an improvement in wafer metrology is required. In addition, it was discovered that the CMP process has several potential defects including stress cracking, delaminating at weak interfaces, and corrosive attacks from slurry chemicals. The oxide polishing process, which is the oldest and most used in today's industry, has one problem: a lack