US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on March 17 for "Methods and apparatus for tungsten gap fill" (California Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,577,658, issued on March 17, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Methods and apparatus for tungsten gap fill" was invented by Wei Lei (Campbell, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods for forming tungsten gap fill on a feature. A method for forming tungsten gap fill in a feature can include: treating a first layer on a substrate having a portion of the first layer exposed through the feature; depositing a tungsten liner layer atop the treated portion of the first layer in the feature using a physical vapor deposition (PVD) process; and depositing a tungsten fill layer into the feature and atop the tungs...