PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15874005
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-01
Publication Date: 2018-07
Patent Classification: ["257", "288000"]

Abstract:
Semiconductor devices employing reduced area conformal contacts for reducing parasitic capacitance and improving performance, and related methods are disclosed. The area of the source/drain contacts for providing an electrical contract to a source/drain is reduced in size to reduce parasitic capacitance between a gate and the source/drain contacts for improved performance. To mitigate or avoid increase in contact resistance between the source/drain contacts and source/drain, a conformal contact layer of a desired thickness is disposed adjacent to the source/drain to reduce the source/drain contact resistance. Thus, the source/drain contacts may only have to extend down adjacent to an upper region of the source/drain to still achieve a desired, lower contact resistance with the source/drain contacts, which results in a reduced area source/drain contact for reducing parasitic capacitance.

Claim (Index 29):
The method of  claim 28 , further comprising:\n etching a first contact fill cavity in the interlayer dielectric material down to a top surface of the first conformal contact layer; and etching a second contact fill cavity in the interlayer dielectric material down to a top surface of the second conformal contact layer; wherein:\n disposing the first contact comprises filling the first contact fill cavity with a first contact fill metal around and contacting only the portion of the surface area of the first conformal contact layer to form the source contact electrically coupled to the source; and \n disposing the second contact comprises filling the second contact fill cavity with a second contact fill metal around and contacting only the portion of the surface area of the second conformal contact layer to form the drain contact electrically coupled to the drain.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 10.0
- Percentile: 86.0
- Lexical Diversity: 2.15873
- Patent Class: 257.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15602326', '15598393', '15585865', '14951660', '15728615']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.9195468014998393
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5018875065977644
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8777808720096318
- Mean Citation Score: 246.22445
- Max Citation Score: 268.69943
- Similarity Product: 200.14635451978089

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