PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15991413
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-05
Publication Date: 2018-09
Patent Classification: ["438", "666000"]

Abstract:
Described herein are methods of filling features with tungsten, and related systems and apparatus, involving inhibition of tungsten nucleation. In some embodiments, the methods involve selective inhibition along a feature profile. Methods of selectively inhibiting tungsten nucleation can include exposing the feature to a direct or remote plasma. Pre-inhibition and post-inhibition treatments are used to modulate the inhibition effect, facilitating feature fill using inhibition across a wide process window. The methods described herein can be used to fill vertical features, such as in tungsten vias, and horizontal features, such as vertical NAND (VNAND) wordlines. The methods may be used for both conformal fill and bottom-up/inside-out fill. Examples of applications include logic and memory contact fill, DRAM buried wordline fill, vertically integrated memory gate and wordline fill, and 3-D integration using through-silicon vias.

Claim (Index 11):
The method of  claim 8 , wherein thermally annealing the substrate comprises raising the substrate temperature at least 50\u00b0 C. after inhibiting tungsten nucleation.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 5.0
- Percentile: 93.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.77647
- Patent Class: 438.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: none
- Component Type: 0
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['14866621', '15640940', '13774350', '15156129', '14465610']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8738418265130575
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5383391912869439
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8402915629904462
- Mean Citation Score: 315.4826819999999
- Max Citation Score: 360.65167
- Similarity Product: 288.9896633680779

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