ALTUS Product Family
Products
Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD)
Lam’s market-leading ALTUS® systems combine CVD and ALD technologies to deposit the highly conformal films needed for advanced metallization applications.
Molybdenum (Mo) can be deposited using ALD to provide better filling of device features. Alternatively, it can be deposited with non-fluorinated halide precursors to avoid dielectric damage caused in some tungsten applications. The etchback and chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) processes are accomplished with known chemistries and tool sets for faster integration in the fab process flow.
Tungsten deposition is used to form conductive features like contacts, vias, and plugs on a chip. These features are small, often narrow, and use only a small amount of metal, so minimizing resistance and achieving complete fill can be difficult. At these nanoscale dimensions, even slight imperfections can impact device performance or cause a chip to fail.
Industry Challenges
As semiconductor manufacturers move to smaller technology nodes, contact metallization processes face significant scaling and integration challenges, such as minimizing contact resistance to meet the lower power consumption and high-speed requirements of advanced devices.
For nanoscale structures, complete fill with tungsten (W) using conventional CVD is limited by overhang from conventional barrier films and deposition techniques. This results in closure of the feature opening before complete fill can take place, leading to voids, higher resistance, and contact failure. Even completely filled smaller features contain less tungsten, which results in higher contact resistance.
Advanced memory and logic features require deposition techniques that enable complete, defect-free tungsten fill, while reducing resistance of the bulk tungsten. Good barrier step coverage and lower resistance at reduced thicknesses (relative to physical vapor deposition/CVD barrier films) is needed to improve contact fill and reduce contact resistance.
The demand for more advanced computational capabilities is increasing considerably and today’s chipmakers are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the race to scale.
Why Molybdenum
To meet the requirements of NAND, DRAM, and logic features, different deposition technology is required. Traditional metallization schemes simply cannot meet these scaling requirements, so the industry is implementing molybdenum (Mo) metallization across all three leading edge IC types.
However, significant innovation is needed to make Mo viable in manufacturing using ALD tools. These challenges include: ability to apply high temperatures, enabling advanced reactor and process sequence designs, being able to precisely control wafer temperature and offering bulk delivery of the Mo solid precursor through various chemical handling.
Key Customer Benefits
- Quad station module (QSM) architecture for process flexibility and productivity with sequential processing and multi-temperature deposition for liner and bulk
- Advanced ALD fill technology
- Wafer bow management with high-temperature vacuum-clamped ceramic pedestal for excellent thermal uniformity and no backside deposition
- Sub-fab sublimation cabinet for precursor delivery, resulting in reduced fab footprint and uninterrupted precursor ampule change
- An integrated clean using innovative advanced chemical etch (ACE)
- Multi-station, multi-temperature sequential or batch processes
- Thermal and plasma Mo ALD
- Capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) and remote plasma pretreatment options
- Platform configuration flexibility
- Industry benchmark for tungsten film productivity
- Nucleation layer formed using Lam’s Pulsed Nucleation Layer (PNL) ALD process and in-situ bulk CVD fill enabled by patented Multi-Station Sequential Deposition (MSSD) architecture
- Lower overall resistivity of thin W films using ALD to reduce thickness and alter CVD bulk fill grain growth
- Low-fluorine, low-stress W fill for advanced 3D NAND and DRAM
- High step coverage with reduced thickness (relative to conventional barrier) films by using ALD in the deposition of WN films
Product Offerings
- ALTUS® Halo
- Concept Two® ALTUS®
- ALTUS® Max
- ALTUS® Max ExtremeFill™
- ALTUS® DirectFill™ Max
- ALTUS® Max ICEFill®
- ALTUS® LFW
Key Applications
- Plug, contact, and via fill
- 3D NAND wordlines
- Low-stress composite interconnects
- WN barrier for via and contact metallization