US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Dec. 9 for "In-situ reflectometry for real-time process control" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,492,890, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"In-situ reflectometry for real-time process control" was invented by Khokan C. Paul (Cupertino, Calif.), Zhepeng Cong (San Jose, Calif.), Tao Sheng (Santa Clara, Calif.), Edward W. Budiarto (Fremont, Calif.) and Todd Egan (Fremont, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In one implementation, a method of monitoring film thickness on a substrate, comprises: generating light from a light source; collimating the light from the light source to form a collimated beam; reflecting the collimated beam off of a surface to be measured to produce a reflected bea...