PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15994435
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-05
Publication Date: 2018-12
Patent Classification: ["438", "626000"]

Abstract:
Advanced flat metals for microelectronics are provided. While conventional processes create large damascene features that have a dishing defect that causes failure in bonded devices, example systems and methods described herein create large damascene features that are planar. In an implementation, an annealing process creates large grains or large metallic crystals of copper in large damascene cavities, while a thinner layer of copper over the field of a substrate anneals into smaller grains of copper. The large grains of copper in the damascene cavities resist dishing defects during chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP), resulting in very flat damascene features. In an implementation, layers of resist and layers of a second coating material may be applied in various ways to resist dishing during chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP), resulting in very flat damascene features.

Claim (Index 1):
A method, comprising:\n providing a substrate with at least one cavity at a surface; forming a conductive layer inside and outside the cavity, wherein a conductive layer within the cavity is thicker than a conductive layer outside the cavity; annealing the substrate to generate larger metal grains in the cavity and smaller metal grains outside the cavity; polishing the conductive layers, wherein the larger metal grains resist the polishing more than the smaller metal grains; and wherein the polishing removes the conductive layer outside the cavity while forming a flat conductive feature in the cavity with a dishing defect of less than 3 nanometers per 10 micron width of the flat conductive feature.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 4.0
- Percentile: 93.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.87013
- Patent Class: 438.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: open
- Component Type: 1
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['11602128', '13170095', '15919894', '10858766', '11893793']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8637517900663618
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5052894410907118
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8279055551687968
- Mean Citation Score: 224.554644
- Max Citation Score: 241.85347
- Similarity Product: 152.54525618643044

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

Dataset: test