US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Feb. 17 for "Electrochemical reduction of surface metal oxides" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,553,129, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Electrochemical reduction of surface metal oxides" was invented by Yoon Ah Shin (Santa Clara, Calif.), Bencherki Mebarki (Santa Clara, Calif.), Joung Joo Lee (San Jose, Calif.), Xianmin Tang (San Jose, Calif.), Thai Cheng Chua (Cupertino, Calif.) and Christian W. Valencia (Alhambra, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods for reducing metal oxide layers on semiconductor devices to pure metal layers using microwave radiation are described. The method includes exposing a semiconductor substrate surface to microwave radiation to reduce a metal o...