Applied forays into flowable CVD scene

SANTA CLARA: In a much-anticipated move, Applied Materials Inc. rolled out a new chemical vapor deposition (CVD) technology on Tuesday (Aug. 24). The new CVD is said to be capable of addressing gap-fill challenges in advanced chip designs.

The tool - Producer Eterna Flowable CVD (FCVD) - provides bottoms up, void-free fill in memory and logic designs at 20-nm and below, EETimes reported.

Gap fill is one of the major but least obvious bottlenecks that come up in advanced chip production. Chipmakers have been using high-density plasma (HDP) CVD or related technology to handle this process- by which heat-induced chemical reactions take place to produce an oxide film. In HDP CVD, the gaps and voids are filled from the walls of a device.

HDP CVD technology has been extended to 45-nm and below but chipmakers have come to a point where they need to optimize HDP CVD films to handle the advance nodes- an expensive and difficult process. For this, some top chipmakers have begun using rival spin-on materials, which use spin coaters to deposit the materials on a device. Unfortunately, this process requires 20 extra steps and is 30 percent more expensive than FCVD.

In the new class of CVD, Applied's FCVD claims to deliver dense, carbon-free dielectric films at up to half the cost of rival spin-on deposition methods. This will reportedly enable a new class of advanced planar as well as 3-D devices, such as DRAM vertical transistor circuits, FinFETs and NAND vertical bit stack chips.

Although the company has not released information on the film or bottoms up methodology, it has revealed that the Eterna FCVD has been installed at six customer sites.