ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,237,221, issued on Feb. 25, was assigned to Lam Research Corp. (Fremont, Calif.).
"Nucleation-free tungsten deposition" was invented by Sema Ermez (Santa Clara, Calif.), Ruopeng Deng (San Jose, Calif.), Yutaka Nishioka (Saijo-cho, Japan), Xiaolan Ba (Fremont, Calif.), Sanjay Gopinath (Fremont, Calif.) and Michal Danek (Cupertino, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Provided herein are methods of depositing tungsten (W) films without depositing a nucleation layer. In certain embodiments, the methods involve depositing a conformal reducing agent layer of boron (B) and/or silicon (Si) on a substrate. The substrate generally includes a fea...