Patent ID: 8175736

Claim:
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 CD data for at least one feature; determining a process recipe for performing a chemical oxide removal (COR) process and a post-heat treatment (PHT) process by: comparing the input state with the desired state, wherein the CD data is compared to the target CD data, creating at least one binning table for a trim amount space extending between a lower boundary to establish a lower limit for trimming achievable by a series of pre-qualified control recipes and an upper boundary to establish an upper limit for trimming achievable by the series of pre-qualified control recipes, said at least one binning table divides said trim amount space into a plurality of bins, each of said plurality of bins has at least one of said pre-qualified control recipes associated therewith that achieves an amount of trimming bounded by a lower trim amount boundary and an upper trim amount boundary, correlating a difference between the CD data and the target CD data with a trim amount, selecting a bin in said at least one binning table, wherein said trim amount is bounded by said lower trim amount boundary and said upper trim amount boundary for said bin, and selecting one of said pre-qualified control recipes associated with said bin as said process recipe; and 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 a layer on the substrate and the PHT process including thermally treating the substrate to evaporate the chemically altered exposed surface layers of the layer on the substrate.