ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,308,240, issued on May 20, was assigned to SPTS Technologies Ltd. (Newport, Great Britain).
"Method and apparatus" was invented by Janet Hopkins (Newport, Great Britain) and Simon Dawson (Newport, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A metallic feature on a substrate is subjected to a plasma dicing process and is cleaned. The workpiece has a carrier sheet attached to a frame member. The carrier sheet carries the substrate. The workpiece is provided on a workpiece support disposed within a chamber of an inductively coupled plasma apparatus. A sputter etch step is performed, including introducing a sputter gas or gas mixture into t...