US Patent Issued to Carl Zeiss SMT on April 15 for "Drive device, optical system and lithography apparatus" (German Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,276,916, issued on April 15, was assigned to Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH (Oberkochen, Germany).

"Drive device, optical system and lithography apparatus" was invented by Michel Aliman (Oberkochen, Germany), Matthias Manger (Aalen-Unterkochen, Germany), Lars Berger (Aalen-Unterkochen, Germany) and Mohammad Awad (Heidenheim, Germany).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A drive device includes: a drive unit configured to apply a drive voltage to a capacitive actuator to set a position of a capacitive actuator; a source controllable by an excitation signal and coupled to the first node to feed a time-dependent AC current signal into the first node so that a...