US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Oct. 20 for "Polishing carrier head with multiple zones" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,766,665, issued on Oct. 20, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Polishing carrier head with multiple zones" was invented by Steven M. Zuniga (Soquel, Calif.), Jay Gurusamy (Santa Clara, Calif.), Andrew J. Nagengast (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Vladimir Galburt (Campbell, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A carrier head for a polishing system includes a housing, a flexible membrane, a first plurality of pressure supply lines, a second plurality of pressure supply lines, and a valve assembly. The flexible membrane defines a multiplicity of independently pressurizable chambers. The valve assembly has a multiplicity...