US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Nov. 25 for "Determining substrate orientation with acoustic signals" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 25 -- United States Patent no. 12,479,062, issued on Nov. 25, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Determining substrate orientation with acoustic signals" was invented by Nicholas A. Wiswell (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Benjamin Cherian (San Jose, Calif.), Jun Qian (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Thomas H. Osterheld (Mountain View, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A chemical mechanical polishing apparatus includes a platen to support a polishing pad, a carrier head to hold a surface of a substrate against the polishing pad, a motor to generate relative motion between the platen and the carrier head so as to polish an overlying layer on the substrate, an i...