US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Feb. 3 for "Plasma processing with tunable nitridation" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,540,384, issued on Feb. 3, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Plasma processing with tunable nitridation" was invented by Wei Liu (San Jose, Calif.), Shashank Sharma (Fremont, Calif.), Matthew Spuller (Belmont, Calif.) and Vladimir Nagorny (Tracy, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In an embodiment, a method for nitriding a substrate is provided. The method includes flowing a nitrogen-containing source and a carrier gas into a plasma processing source coupled to a chamber such that a flow rate of the nitrogen-containing source is from about 3% to 20% of a flow rate of the carrier gas; generating an inductive...