Our recent work has established the successful use of ion implantation into silicon [1] or polyimide [2] to seed the electroless plating of copper on these surfaces. The substrates exhibit a threshold implantation dose, below which the plating does not occur. The threshold implantation dose for seeding of electroless Cu films on Pd implanted Si was observed to be about 20 times lower than that for polyimide. In this paper we demonstrate a successful exploitation of this difference in threshold dose to deposit thin copper structures selectivity only on (100) silicon wafer patterned with polyimide and implanted with Pd ions. A detailed analysis of the implanted and plated samples, using RBS, SEM and optical microscopy is also presented.
