ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,412,738, issued on Sept. 9, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"System for target arcing mapping and plasma diagnosis" was invented by Junjie Pan (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Xiangjin Xie (Fremont, Calif.) and Fuhong Zhang (San Jose, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods of monitoring arcing in a process chamber, processing chambers and monitoring apparatus are described. At least one of the angular or radial position of a magnetron is determined in the chamber relative to a reference location on a surface of the substrate using positional information from one or more motors. An arcing profile is generated com...