ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,255,071, issued on March 18, was assigned to Disco Corp. (Tokyo).
"Grinding apparatus" was invented by Satoru Fujimura (Tokyo), Kyohei Ichiishi (Tokyo) and Yujiro Sudo (Tokyo).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A grinding apparatus includes a holding table that holds a wafer, a grinding unit that grinds an exposed surface of the wafer held by the holding table, a detecting unit that detects a physical quantity used for determination of the state of exposure of a separation surface of the wafer, and a control unit having an exposure determining unit that determines the state of exposure of the separation surface on the basis of the physical q...