ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,381,102, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to Tokyo Electron Ltd. (Tokyo).

"Substrate processing apparatus and substrate processing method" was invented by Kousei Ide (Kumamoto, Japan), Naruaki Iida (Kumamoto, Japan) and Kazuya Matsushita (Kumamoto, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A substrate processing apparatus includes: a loading/unloading block; a processing station provided on one of left and right sides of the loading/unloading block; a relay block provided on one of left and right sides of the processing station; processing blocks provided side by side in a left-right direction to form the processing station, each of the processi...