Pretreatment for electroless deposition
AssigneeApplied Materials, Inc.
InventorsSergey Lopatin, Arulkumar Shanmugasundram, Ramin Emami, Hongbin Fang
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Abstract
Embodiments of the present invention relate to an apparatus and method of annealing substrates in a thermal anneal chamber and/or a plasma anneal chamber before electroless deposition thereover. In one embodiment, annealing in a thermal anneal chamber includes heating the substrate in a vacuum environment while providing a gas, such as noble gases, hydrogen gas, other reducing gases, nitrogen gas, other non-reactive gases, and combinations thereof. In another embodiment, annealing in a plasma chamber comprises plasma annealing the substrate in a plasma, such as a plasma from an argon gas, helium gas, hydrogen gas, and combinations thereof.
Claims19
A method for processing a planarized substrate comprising exposed dielectric portions and exposed copper portions, comprising:
- annealing the exposed dielectric portions and exposed copper portions of the substrate at a reduced pressure while providing a gas selected from the group consisting of noble gases, hydrogen gas, other reducing gases, nitrogen gas, other non-reactive gases, and combinations thereof, wherein the gas is a combination of gases comprising at least about 1% to about 10% reducing gas by volume;
- and
- depositing a capping layer selectively over the exposed copper portions of the substrate by electroless deposition.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.