ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,565,698, issued on March 3, was assigned to SPTS Technologies Ltd. (Newport, Great Britain).
"Method of operating a PVD apparatus" was invented by Scott Haymore (Newport, Great Britain), Tony Wilby (Newport, Great Britain) and Stephen Burgess (Newport, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A PVD apparatus can be operated in a cleaning mode to remove material from an electrically conductive feature formed on a semiconductor substrate. The semiconductor substrate with the electrically conductive feature formed thereon is positioned on a substrate support in a chamber of the PVD apparatus. A shutter is deployed within the chamber to ...