Patent ID: 7877161
Filing Date: 2011-01-25
Classification: C23C,C25D,H01L

Abstract:
1. A method of processing a substrate by chemical oxide removal (COR) comprising: determining a desired state for the substrate, wherein the desired state comprises target critical dimension (CD) data; receiving pre-process metrology data for the substrate, wherein the pre-process metrology data defines an input state for the substrate and comprises isolated CD data for at least one isolated feature and nested CD data for at least one nested feature; determining a process recipe for performing a chemical oxide removal (COR) process and a post-heat treatment (PHT) process by: processing the substrate to achieve the trim amount using the process recipe, the COR process including chemically treating the substrate by chemically altering exposed surface layers of an oxide hard mask on the substrate and the PHT process including thermally treating the substrate to evaporate the chemically altered exposed surface layers of the oxide hard mask.