US Patent Issued to International Business Machines on March 24 for "Area selective deposition of hardmasks for vacuum gap formation" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,588,436, issued on March 24, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).

"Area selective deposition of hardmasks for vacuum gap formation" was invented by Noel Arellano (Gilroy, Calif.), Krystelle Lionti (San Jose, Calif.) and Rudy J Wojtecki (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for vacuum gap formation on a dielectric substrate uses area selective deposition (ASD), such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) or chemical vapor deposition (CVD), of a hardmask material on a substrate patterned with a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) and metal features. Due to the presence of the SAM, the hardmask mat...