PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 16244051
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2019-01
Publication Date: 2019-06
Patent Classification: ["438", "585000"]

Abstract:
Embodiments described herein generally relate to enable the formation of a metal gate structure with a reduced effective oxide thickness over a similar structure formed via conventional methods. A plasma hydrogenation process followed by a plasma nitridization process, or a single-step plasma hydrogenation and nitridization process, is performed on a metal nitride layer in a film stack, thereby, according to some embodiments, removing oxygen atoms disposed within layers of the film stack and, in some embodiments, adding nitrogen atoms to the layers of the film stack. As a result, an effective oxide thickness of the metal gate structure is reduced with little or no accompanying flatband voltage shift.

Claim (Index 18):
The method of  claim 11 , wherein a substrate bias is applied to the semiconductor substrate while exposing the exposed surface to the plasma-excited hydrogen species and the plasma-excited nitrogen species.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 16.0
- Percentile: 99.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.80303
- Patent Class: 438.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: none
- Component Type: 0
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15442311', '16159461', '15438490', '15874132', '11731265']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8931012536438475
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5650395830324831
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.860295086582711
- Mean Citation Score: 366.310928
- Max Citation Score: 435.74838
- Similarity Product: 344.3091479708004

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 0
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test