US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Dec. 2 for "Shadow ring lift to improve wafer edge performance" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 2 -- United States Patent no. 12,486,576, issued on Dec. 2, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Shadow ring lift to improve wafer edge performance" was invented by Zubin Huang (Santa Clara, Calif.), Jallepally Ravi (San Ramon, Calif.), Kai Wu (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Xiaoxiong Yuan (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method and apparatus for processing a substrate are described herein. The methods and apparatus described enable the raising and lowering of a shadow ring within a process chamber either simultaneously with or separately from a plurality of substrate lift pins. The shadow ring is raised and lowered using a shadow ring...