US Patent Issued to Lam Research on Aug. 25 for "Subtractive copper etch" (Belgian, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 25 -- United States Patent no. 12,719,031, issued on Aug. 25, was assigned to Lam Research Corp. (Fremont, Calif.).

"Subtractive copper etch" was invented by Wenbing Yang (Campbell, Calif.), Ran Lin (Fremont, Calif.), Samantha SiamHwa Tan (Newark, Calif.), Mohand Brouri (Brussels) and Yang Pan (Los Altos, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for atomic layer etching copper or copper alloy over a substrate in a plasma processing chamber comprising a plurality of cycles is provided. Each cycle of the plurality of cycles comprises a copper modification phase and an activation phase. The copper modification phase comprises flowing a modification gas into the plasma...