Patent 12131948 was granted and assigned to Applied Materials on October, 2024 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Embodiments herein include void-free material depositions on a substrate (e.g., in a void-free trench-filled (VFTF) component) obtained using directional etching to remove predetermined portions of a seed layer covering the substrate. In several embodiments, directional etching followed by selective deposition can enable fill material (e.g., metal) patterning in tight spaces without any voids or seams. Void-free material depositions may be used in a variety of semiconductor devices, such as transistors, dual work function stacks, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), non-volatile memory, and the like.