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US 9,837,312 B1Granted
Atomic layer etching for enhanced bottom-up feature fill
AssigneeLam Research Corporation
InventorsSamantha Tan, Taeseung Kim, Jengyi Yu, Praveen Nalla, Novy Tjokro, Artur Kolics, Keren Jacobs Kanarik
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Abstract
Atomic layer etching (ALE) enables effective filling of small feature structures on semiconductor and other substrates, such as contacts and vias, by bottom-up fill, for example electroless deposition (ELD) of cobalt.
Claims20
A method of filling features on a semiconductor substrate, the method comprising:
- (a) directionally atomic layer etching a deposited material comprising one or more of a metal and a catalyst for deposition of the metal from at least one of a neck region and an adjacent field region of a feature on a semiconductor substrate by,
- (i) modifying the surface of the deposited material by exposing the material to a halogen-containing gas, and
- (ii) exposing the modified surface to an activation gas to selectively etch the modified deposited material;
- and
- (b) depositing the metal in the feature by a bottom-up fill deposition technique.
2 more elements
A method comprising:
- (a) directionally atomic layer etching cobalt from a neck region of a feature on a semiconductor by exposing the substrate to alternating pulses of a halogen-containing gas and an activation gas;
- and
- (b) at least partially filling the feature with cobalt by ELD.
An apparatus for processing semiconductor substrates, the apparatus comprising:
- a process etch chamber comprising a showerhead and a substrate support,
- a plasma generator, and
- an electroless plating chamber;
- a controller having at least one processor and a memory,
- wherein the at least one processor and the memory are communicatively connected with one another,
- the at least one processor is at least operatively connected with flow-control hardware, and
- the memory stores machine-readable instructions for:
- (a) in the process etch chamber, directionally atomic layer etching a deposited material comprising one or more of a metal and a catalyst for deposition of the metal from at least one of a neck region and an adjacent field region of a feature on a semiconductor substrate by,
- (i) modifying the surface of the deposited material by exposing the material to a halogen-containing gas, and
- (ii) exposing the modified surface to an activation gas to selectively etch the modified deposited material;
- and
- (b) in the electroless deposition chamber, depositing the & metal in the feature by a bottom-up fill deposition technique.
9 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.