US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Feb. 17 for "Machine learning for classifying retaining rings" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,551,981, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Machine learning for classifying retaining rings" was invented by Eric Lau (Santa Clara, Calif.), Andrew J. Nagengast (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Charles C. Garretson (Monterey, Calif.), Huanbo Zhang (San Jose, Calif.) and Zhize Zhu (Cupertino, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for optimizing polishing includes, for each respective retaining ring of a plurality of retaining rings mounted on a particular carrier head, performing measurements for a bottom surface of the respective retaining ring mounted on the particular carrier head using a co...