Lam Research Corporation

Marvell International Limited

Gang Liu

Anand Chandrashekar

Leonard Wai Fung Kho

Krishna Birru

Bo Gong

Curtis Warren Bailey

Huatan Qiu

Geoffrey Hohn

Guangbi Yuan

Damodar Rajaram Shanbhag

Andrew H Breninger

Fengyuan Lai

Tony Kaushal

Chen-Hua Hsu

Rohit Khare

William Schlosser

Thadeous Bamford

Songping Wu

Tsung-Han Yang

Yonghua Song

Daxiao Yu

Michael Bowes

Hui-Ling Lou

Eric H Lenz

Lawrence Tse

King Chun Tsai

Sanjay Gopinath

Deqi Wang

Hua Qian

Leonard Kho

Lei Guo

John W Griswold

Gishun Hsu

Provided herein are methods and apparatuses for controlling uniformity of processing at an edge region of a semiconductor wafer. In some embodiments, the methods include providing a backside inhibition gas as part of a deposition-inhibition-deposition (DID) sequence.

Backside reactive inhibition gas

Methods of mitigating line bending during feature fill include deposition of a nucleation layer having increased roughness. In some embodiments, the methods include depositing two or more metal nucleation layers.

Reducing line bending during metal fill process

An exhaust system for a substrate processing system includes a radical generator configured to receive a gas mixture including halogen species and to generate halogen radicals, a first pump to pump exhaust gas from an exhaust outlet of a processing chamber, and a first valve configured to selectively fluidly connect an outlet of the radical generator to the first pump downstream from the outlet of the processing chamber.

Cleaning system for removing deposits from pump in an exhaust of a substrate processing system

Methods for selective inhibition control in semiconductor manufacturing are provided. An example method includes providing a substrate including a feature having one or more feature openings and a feature interior. A nucleation layer is formed on a surface of the feature interior. Based on a differential inhibition profile, a nonconformal bulk layer is selectively formed on a surface of the nucleation layer to leave a region of the nucleation layer covered, and a region of the nucleation layer uncovered by the nonconformal bulk layer. An inhibition layer is selectively formed on the covered and uncovered regions of the nucleation layer. Tungsten is deposited in the feature in accordance with the differential inhibition profile.

Tungsten feature fill with inhibition control

Forming a protective coating ex situ in an atomic layer deposition process to coat one or more chamber components subsequently installed in a reaction chamber provides a number of benefits over more conventional coating methods such as in situ deposition of an undercoat. In certain cases the protective coating may have a particular composition such as aluminum oxide, aluminum fluoride, aluminum nitride, yttrium oxide, and/or yttrium fluoride. The protective coating may help reduce contamination on wafers processed using the coated chamber component. Further, the protective coating may act to stabilize the processing conditions within the reaction chamber, thereby achieving very stable/uniform processing results over the course of processing many batches of wafers, and minimizing radical loss. Also described are a number of techniques that may be used to restore the protective coating after the coated chamber component is used to process semiconductor wafers.

Ex situ coating of chamber components for semiconductor processing

The methods, systems and apparatus described herein relate to chamber conditioning for remote plasma processes, in particular remote nitrogen-based plasma processes. Certain implementations of the disclosure relate to remote plasma inhibition processes for feature fill that include chamber conditioning. Embodiments of the disclosure relate to exposing remote plasma processing chambers to fluorine species prior to nitrogen-based remote plasma processing of substrates such as semiconductor wafers. Within-wafer uniformity and wafer-to-wafer uniformity is improved.

Chamber conditioning for remote plasma process

Systems and methods for using non-crystal-based reference oscillators in the transmission and reception of frequency-modulated signals are disclosed. To protect against intrusion on neighboring designated frequency bands, guard bands, having a collective width greater than the total expected error based on the contribution of the frequency error from the non-crystal-based oscillators in the transmitter and/or receiver, can be designated. To protect against inter-channel interference within a designated frequency band, transmitters and receivers can include static sub-bandwidths wider than any possible total frequency error, such that it would be impossible for a transmitter or receiver to attempt to communicate on an unintended sub-band. The determination of the total possible frequency error can be determined dynamically based on the correlation between a received training sequence and a known pattern before or a communication session to avoid or correct for frequency offset or drift due to the use of non-crystal-based reference oscillators.

System and method for tuning a receiver by iteratively dividing a frequency band into multiple sub-bands

System and method for non-crystal-based communications

In a method and system for controlling gain in an RF receiver, an RF signal is analyzed over different attack and decay windows, from which the receiver determines (1) if the signal is in an attack condition with dip values below a threshold level thus indicating a need for increasing signal gain, or (2) if the signal is in a decay condition with threshold values above a threshold level thus indicating a need for decreasing signal gain. The receiver applies attack and decay windows of different sizes and in an asynchronous manner to create a gain control scheme that is insensitive to transient effects such as channel interference and deep fading that affect the intensities of an in-band signal.

RF-AGC scheme insensitive to channel interference and deep fading

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Gang Liu