ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,745,577, issued on Sept. 22, 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 Steve Burgess (Newport, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A PVD apparatus can perform a cleaning step and a deposition step on an electrically conductive feature formed on a semiconductor substrate. The semiconductor substrate with the electrically conductive feature thereon can be positioned on the substrate support. A cleaning step can be performed to remove material from the electrically conductive ...