US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on March 3 for "Semiconductor film plating perimeter mapping and compensation" (Montana Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,568,778, issued on March 3, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Semiconductor film plating perimeter mapping and compensation" was invented by Kyle M. Hanson (Kalispell, Mont.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Conditions at the perimeter of the wafer may be characterized and used to adjust current stolen by the weir thief electrodes during a plating process to generate more uniform film thicknesses. An electrode may be positioned in a plating chamber near the periphery of the wafer as the wafer rotates. To characterize the electrical contacts on the seal, a wafer with a seed layer may be loaded into the plating ch...