ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,334,384, issued on June 17, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Methods and apparatus for minimizing substrate backside damage" was invented by Liangfa Hu (San Jose, Calif.), Abdul Aziz Khaja (San Jose, Calif.), Sarah Michelle Bobek (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Prashant Kumar Kulshreshtha (San Jose, Calif.) and Yoichi Suzuki (Funabashi, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Embodiments of the present disclosure generally relate to apparatus and methods for reducing substrate backside damage during semiconductor device processing. In one implementation, a method of chucking a substrate in a substrate process chamber incl...