US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Jan. 13 for "Wordline sidewall contacts in 3D NAND structures" (Canadian, American, Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 13 -- United States Patent no. 12,525,260, issued on Jan. 13, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Wordline sidewall contacts in 3D NAND structures" was invented by Hsiang Yu Lee (Cupertino, Calif.), Pradeep K. Subrahmanyan (Los Gatos, Calif.), Takaya Matsushita (Tokyo) and Changwoo Sun (Ontario, Canada).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A three-dimensional (3D) NAND memory structure may include material layers arranged in a vertical stack including alternating horizontal insulating layers and wordline layers. The material layers may be etched to form a landing pad. A vertical wordline may extend through one or more of the horizontal wordline layers...