Lam Research Corporation

Tamal Mukherjee

Yang Pan

Wenbing Yang

Samantha SiamHwa Tan

Ran Lin

Samantha Siamhwa Tan

Yiwen Fan

Keren Jacobs Kanarik

Hong Shih

Girish Anant Dixit

Shih-Ked Lee

Jengyi Yu

Zhongwei Zhu

Mohand Brouri

Wook Choi

Chunhong Zhou

Xiaoyu Kang

Ziad El Otell

A method for cleaning a plasma processing chamber comprising one or more cycles is provided. Each cycle comprises performing an oxygen containing plasma cleaning phase, performing a volatile chemistry type residue cleaning phase, and performing a fluorine containing plasma cleaning phase.

Method for cleaning a chamber

A method of cleaning residue containing ruthenium (Ru) residue on at least one surface of a component of a semiconductor processing chamber is provided. The residue is exposed to a Ru cleaning composition comprising at least one of hypochlorite and Obased chemistries, wherein the Ru cleaning composition removes the Ru residue.

Method of cleaning chamber components with metal etch residues

A method is provided. A substrate situated in a chamber is exposed to a halogen-containing gas comprising an element selected from the group consisting of silicon, germanium, carbon, titanium, and tin, and igniting a plasma to modify a surface of the substrate and form a modified surface. The substrate is exposed to an activated activation gas to etch at least part of the modified surface.

Chemical etch nonvolatile materials for MRAM patterning

A method for selectively etching a stack with respect to a mask is provided. An atomic layer etch is provided to at least partially etch the stack, wherein the atomic layer etch forms at least some residue. An ion beam is provided to etch the stack, wherein the ion beam etch removes at least some of the residue from the atomic layer etch.

Atomic layer etch and ion beam etch patterning

A method for atomic layer etching a metal containing layer is provided. At least a region of a surface of the metal containing layer is modified to form a modified metal containing region by exposing a surface of the metal containing layer to a modification gas, wherein adjacent to the modified metal containing region remains an unmodified metal containing region. The modified metal containing region is selectively removed with respect to the unmodified metal containing region by exposing the surface of the metal containing layer to an inert bombardment plasma generated from an inert gas.

Atomic layer etching for subtractive metal etch

Etching a refractory metal or other high surface binding energy material on a substrate can maintain or increase the smoothness of the metal/high EO surface, in some cases produce extreme smoothing. A substrate having an exposed refractory metal/high EO surface is provided. The refractory metal/high EO surface is exposed to a modification gas to modify the surface and form a modified refractory metal/high EO surface. The modified refractory metal/high EO surface is exposed to an energetic particle to preferentially remove the modified refractory metal/high EO surface relative to an underlying unmodified refractory metal/high EO surface such that the exposed refractory metal/high EO surface after removing the modified refractory metal/high EO surface is as smooth or smoother than the substrate surface before exposing the substrate surface to the modification gas.

Atomic layer etching and smoothing of refractory metals and other high surface binding energy materials

Methods and apparatus for performing high energy atomic layer etching are provided herein. Methods include providing a substrate having a material to be etched, exposing a surface of the material to a modification gas to modify the surface and form a modified surface, and exposing the modified surface to an energetic particle to preferentially remove the modified surface relative to an underlying unmodified surface where the energetic particle has an ion energy sufficient to overcome an average surface binding energy of the underlying unmodified surface. The energy of the energetic particle used is very high; in some cases, the power applied to a bias used when exposing the modified surface to the energetic particle is at least 150 eV.

Growing community of inventors

Fremont, CA, United States of America

Tamal Mukherjee