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 14):
A method, comprising:\n creating trenches or cavities for metal features in a substrate suitable for a microelectronic device; covering the substrate with a metal to create both a cavity layer of the metal at least partially filling the cavities and a field layer of the metal covering a field of the substrate with the metal; thermally annealing the metal to create grains of the metal in the cavity layer of the metal that are larger than grains of the metal in the field layer of the metal; and planarizing at least the grains of the metal in the cavity layer of the metal to achieve flat conductive metal features of the microelectronic device.

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): 0.8645749031070017
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.4975776818717374
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.8278751809834752
- Mean Citation Score: 224.554644
- Max Citation Score: 241.85347
- Similarity Product: 171.004477057693

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