US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on March 4 for "Impurity removal in doped ALD tantalum nitride" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,243,774, issued on March 4, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Impurity removal in doped ALD tantalum nitride" was invented by Rui Li (San Jose, Calif.), Xiangjin Xie (Fremont, Calif.), Tae Hong Ha (San Jose, Calif.), Xianmin Tang (San Jose, Calif.) and Lu Chen (Cupertino, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods of forming copper interconnects are described. A doped tantalum nitride layer formed on a copper layer on a substrate has a first amount of dopant. The doped tantalum nitride layer is exposed to a plasma comprising one or more of helium or neon to form a treated doped tantalum nitride layer with ...