ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,576,476, issued on March 17, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Pad conditioner cut rate monitoring" was invented by Sivakumar Dhandapani (San Jose, Calif.), Sameer Deshpande (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Jason Garcheung Fung (Santa Clara, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An apparatus for chemical mechanical polishing includes a platen having a surface to support a polishing pad, a carrier head to hold a substrate against a polishing surface of the polishing pad, a pad conditioner to hold a conditioning disk against the polishing surface, an in-situ polishing pad thickness monitoring system, and a controller...