ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,406,867, issued on Sept. 2, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
"Split valve air curtain" was invented by Jia-Wei Xu (Taichung, Taiwan), Yin-Bin Tseng (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Kai-Shiung Hsu (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Chun-Sheng Wu (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Contamination from outgassing during a deposition process is addressed by a series of equipment enhancements, including throttle valves, a dual air curtain, and a residual gas analysis (RGA) monitor. The dual air curtain can be configured to flow a first gas during wafer processing and a second gas during wafer unloading, to re-dir...