US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Dec. 9 for "Passive acoustic monitoring and acoustic sensors for chemical mechanical polishing" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,491,603, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Passive acoustic monitoring and acoustic sensors for chemical mechanical polishing" was invented by Nicholas A. Wiswell (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Sohrab Pourmand (San Jose, Calif.), Dominic J. Benvegnu (La Honda, Calif.), Thomas H. Osterheld (Mountain View, Calif.) and Boguslaw A. Swedek (Morgan Hill, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A chemical mechanical polishing apparatus includes a platen to support a polishing pad, a carrier head to a surface of a substrate against the polishing pad, a motor to generate relative motion between the platen and the...