US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Feb. 10 for "Concurrent or cyclical etch and directional deposition" (Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,550,637, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Concurrent or cyclical etch and directional deposition" was invented by Morgan Evans (Manchester, Mass.), John Hautala (Beverly, Mass.) and Charith Nanayakkara (Gloucester, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An etching and deposition system including a process chamber containing a platen for supporting a substrate, an reactive-ion etching (RIE) source adapted to produce an ion beam and to direct the ion beam into the process chamber for etching the substrate, a first plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) source located on a first side...