ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,252,779, issued on March 18, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Methods for in-situ chamber monitoring" was invented by Xiangjin Xie (Fremont, Calif.) and Carmen Leal Cervantes (Mountain View, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods for monitoring process chambers using a controllable plasma oxidation process followed by a controlled reduction process and metrology are described. In some embodiments, the metrology comprises measuring the reflectivity of the metal oxide film formed by the controllable plasma oxidation process and the reduced metal film or surface modified film formed by reducing the meta...