US Patent Issued to SUMCO on Oct. 7 for "Method and apparatus for manufacturing defect-free monocrystalline silicon crystal" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,435,443, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to SUMCO Corp. (Tokyo).

"Method and apparatus for manufacturing defect-free monocrystalline silicon crystal" was invented by Keiichi Takanashi (Saga, Japan) and Ippei Shimozaki (Imari, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A crystal puller apparatus comprises a pulling assembly to pull a crystal from a silicon melt at a pull speed; a crucible that contains the silicon melt; a heat shield above a surface of the silicon melt; a lifter to change a gap between the heat shield and the surface of the silicon melt; and one or more computing devices to determine an adjustment to the gap using a Pv-Pi margin,...