US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Oct. 21 for "Multiple plasma ion source for inline secondary ion mass spectrometry" (California, Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,452,988, issued on Oct. 21, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Multiple plasma ion source for inline secondary ion mass spectrometry" was invented by Ming Hong Yang (Campbell, Calif.), Dimitry Kouzminov (Beverly, Mass.) and Arun Ramaswamy Srivatsa (Fremont, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods leverage premixed gas mixtures to perform a metrology process on a substrate using an inline secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) process. The premixed gas mixture of two or more gases is injected into a plasma chamber that is configured to produce sputtering ions for the inline SIMS process. The two or more g...