PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 16116321
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-08
Publication Date: 2018-12
Patent Classification: ["438", "765000"]

Abstract:
Plasma atomic layer deposition (ALD) is optimized through modulation of the gas residence time during an excited species phase, wherein activated reactant is supplied such as from a plasma. Reduced residence time increases the quality of the deposited layer, such as reducing wet etch rates, increasing index of refraction and/or reducing impurities in the layer. For example, dielectric layers, particularly silicon nitride films, formed from such optimized plasma ALD processes have low levels of impurities remaining from the silicon precursor.

Claim (Index 1):
A method of depositing a layer of dielectric silicon nitride by plasma atomic layer deposition, the method comprising:\n providing a substrate in a reaction space; in a first phase, contacting the substrate with a silicon precursor to adsorb an adsorbed species of the silicon precursor on the substrate; and in a second phase, contacting the substrate with excited nitrogen species to react with the adsorbed species, wherein the residence time of the excited species in the reaction space during the second phase is less than about 1.0 s, and cyclically repeating the first phase and second phase to form a dielectric SiN layer of a desired thickness.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 50.0
- Percentile: 96.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.4918
- Patent Class: 438.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15499188', '14231317', '14855261', '15706435', '11627597']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8583715885351002
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5450552636617699
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8270399560477673
- Mean Citation Score: 317.6867000000001
- Max Citation Score: 383.6425
- Similarity Product: 375.6192910596728

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test