US Patent Issued to Lam Research on Oct. 20 for "Apparatuses for measuring gap between a substrate support plane and gas distribution device" (Oregon Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,772,781, issued on Oct. 20, was assigned to Lam Research Corp. (Fremont, Calif.).

"Apparatuses for measuring gap between a substrate support plane and gas distribution device" was invented by Adriana Vintila (Wilsonville, Ore.), Shriram Vasant Bapat (Beaverton, Ore.), Emily Ann Alden (Portland, Ore.) and Damien Martin Slevin (Salem, Ore.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Some embodiments provide apparatuses capable of enabling the measurement of various characteristics of a showerhead-substrate gap in a processing chamber, including at high temperatures and at low-light conditions, using an imaging system external to the processing chamber....