US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on March 25 for "Machine vision as input to a CMP process control algorithm" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,257,665, issued on March 25, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Machine vision as input to a CMP process control algorithm" was invented by Benjamin Cherian (San Jose, Calif.), Jun Qian (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Nicholas A. Wiswell (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Dominic J. Benvegnu (La Honda, Calif.), Boguslaw A. Swedek (Morgan Hill, Calif.) and Thomas H. Osterheld (Mountain View, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "During chemical mechanical polishing of a substrate, a signal value that depends on a thickness of a layer in a measurement spot on a substrate undergoing polishing is determined by a first in-situ monitoring ...