US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on April 8 for "Apparatus and method for contactless transportation of a carrier" (German Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,273,051, issued on April 8, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Apparatus and method for contactless transportation of a carrier" was invented by Thorsten Meiss (Darmstadt, Germany) and Alexander Sendobry (Muhltal, Germany).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An apparatus for contactless transportation of a carrier is provided. The apparatus includes the carrier, being a substrate carrier or a mask carrier. The apparatus includes a linear reluctance motor for providing both a contactless levitation and a contactless drive of the carrier. The linear reluctance motor includes one or more linear stators defining a trans...