Applied Materials Assigned Patent

Applied Materials, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, has been assigned a patent (11,245,069) developed by Xue, Lin, Sunnyvale, CA, Ahn, Jaesoo, Pakala, Mahendra, Fremont, CA, Ching, Chi Hong, Santa Clara, CA, and Wang, Rongjun, Dublin, CA, for “methods for forming structures with desired crystallinity for MRAM applications.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Embodiments of the disclosure provide methods and apparatus for fabricating magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) structures on a substrate in for spin-transfer-torque magnetoresistive random access memory (STT-MRAM) applications. In one embodiment, the method includes patterning a film stack having a tunneling barrier layer disposed between a magnetic reference layer and a magnetic storage layer disposed on a substrate to remove a portion of the film stack from the substrate until an upper surface of the substrate is exposed, forming a sidewall passivation layer on sidewalls of the patterned film stack and subsequently performing a thermal annealing process to the film stack.”

The patent application was filed on June 30, 2016 (15/199,006).