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US 8,770,143 B2Granted
Multi-region processing system
AssigneeIntermolecular, Inc.
InventorsRick Endo, Kurt Weiner, Indranil De, James Tsung, Maosheng Zhao
Life of this patent
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Abstract
The various embodiments of the invention provide for relative movement of the substrate and a process head to access the entire wafer in a minimal space to conduct combinatorial processing on various regions of the substrate. The heads enable site isolated processing within the chamber described and method of using the same are described.
Claims13
A semiconductor processing chamber, comprising:
- a substrate support configured to support a substrate;
- and
- a moveable process head disposed within the semiconductor processing chamber;
- wherein the moveable process head comprises an inner wall and a moveable assembly disposed within the inner wall,
- wherein the moveable process head is moveably attached to an inner surface of the inner wall through a seal enabling slideable translation of the movable process head in a direction perpendicular to the substrate;
- wherein a shield is spaced apart from and surrounds at least a lower portion of the inner wall,
- wherein a plurality of non-overlapping site isolated process regions can be defined on the substrate by the position of the inner wall relative to the substrate, and each site isolated process region is defined as the area on the substrate within the inner wall,
- wherein the shield is operable as a barrier to isolate deposition from the movable process head to a single site isolated region;
- wherein the moveable process head is operable to perform a dry process on the site isolated process region,
- wherein an enclosed processing region is defined as the volume between the inner wall, the movable process head, and the substrate, and
- wherein the enclosed processing region can be evacuated through a circumferential gap below the inner wall contemporaneously with the performing of the dry process.
8 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.