PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 16189368
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-11
Publication Date: 2019-03
Patent Classification: ["438", "656000"]

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. The methods include performing multi-stage inhibition treatments including intervals between stages. One or more of plasma source power, substrate bias power, or treatment gas flow may be reduced or turned off during an interval. 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 25):
The method of  claim 21 , wherein the treatment gas is N 2 .

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 44.0
- Percentile: 98.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.71134
- Patent Class: 438.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: none
- Component Type: 0
- Foreign Priority: False
- Related Applications: ['15156129', '15991413', '14866621', '15640940', '15482271']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.8539674876125607
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5178352685843244
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8203542657097371
- Mean Citation Score: 238.804818
- Max Citation Score: 292.62894
- Similarity Product: 190.6455004793036

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