ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,374,552, issued on July 29, was assigned to APPLIED MATERIALS Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Methods for preparing small features on a substrate" was invented by Yongan Xu (Santa Clara, Calif.), Wei Wu (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Ludovic Godet (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to methods for forming features having small and large line widths on the same substrate or device. In some embodiments, the methods described and discussed herein can be used to produce optical and photonic devices. These devices, including augmented reality (AR) devices and/or virtual reality (VR)...