US Patent Issued to APPLIED MATERIALS on Oct. 7 for "Methods and apparatus for seam reduction or elimination" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,438,044, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to APPLIED MATERIALS Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Methods and apparatus for seam reduction or elimination" was invented by Yixiong Yang (Santa Clara, Calif.), Seshadri Ganguli (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Srinivas Gandikota (Santa Clara, Calif.), Yong Yang (Mountain View, Calif.), Jacqueline S. Wrench (San Jose, Calif.) and Luping Li (Santa Clara, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of forming a contact structure in a semiconductor device having a feature includes forming a barrier layer in the feature, wherein the barrier layer is TiN; and forming a metal layer in the feature and over the barrie...