International Business Machines Corporation

Zeon Corporation

Applied Materials, Inc.

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Eric Andrew Joseph

Masahiro Nakamura

Yu Zhu

Robert L Bruce

Mahmoud M Khojasteh

Sebastian Ulrich Engelmann

Satyavolu S Papa Rao

George Gabriel Totir

Michael A Guillorn

Hiroyuki Miyazoe

Markus Brink

Mark Hoinkis

Edmund M Sikorski

Goh Matsuura

A method for cleaning etch residues that may include treating an etched surface with an aqueous lanthanoid solution, wherein the aqueous lanthanoid solution removes an etch residue that includes a majority of hydrocarbons and at least one element selected from the group consisting of carbon, oxygen, fluorine, nitrogen and silicon. In one example, the aqueous solution may be cerium ammonium nitrate (Ce(NH)(NO)),(CAN).

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Pretreatment of an etch chamber for performing a silicon etch process and Bosch process can be effected by running a deposition process employing CHF, or by running an alternating deposition and etch process employing CHFand SF. It has been discovered that the pretreatment of the etch chamber for the silicon etch process can enhance the etch rate of silicon by at least 50% without adverse effect on etch profile during a first each process following the pretreatment, while the etch rate enhancement factor decreases over time. By periodically performing the pretreatment in the etch chamber, the throughput of the etch chamber can be increased without adversely impacting the etch profile of the processed substrates.

Etch rate enhancement for a silicon etch process through etch chamber pretreatment

A method for fabricating a plurality of conductive lines in an integrated circuit includes providing a layer of conductive metal in a multi-layer structure fabricated upon a wafer, forming a spacer in a layer of the multi-layer structure residing above the layer of conductive metal, wherein the spacer is formed from a metal-containing atomic layer deposition material, and transferring a pattern from the spacer to the layer of conductive metal using a sidewall image transfer technique, wherein the transferring results in a formation of the plurality of conductive lines in the layer of conductive material.

Sidewall image transfer for heavy metal patterning in integrated circuits

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Yorktown Heights, NY, United States of America

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