Lam Research Corporation

Thadeous Bamford

Anand Chandrashekar

Leonard Wai Fung Kho

Bo Gong

Curtis Warren Bailey

Huatan Qiu

Geoffrey Hohn

Gang Liu

Guangbi Yuan

Andrew H Breninger

Damodar Rajaram Shanbhag

Fengyuan Lai

Tony Kaushal

Krishna Birru

Chen-Hua Hsu

Rohit Khare

William Schlosser

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

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Portland, OR, United States of America

Thadeous Bamford