US Patent Issued to Tokyo Electron on May 13 for "Autonomous operation of plasma processing tool" (Japanese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,300,477, issued on May 13, was assigned to Tokyo Electron Ltd. (Tokyo).

"Autonomous operation of plasma processing tool" was invented by Jun Shinagawa (Fremont, Calif.), Toshihiro Kitao (Sapporo, Japan), Chungjong Lee (Tokyo), Masaki Kitsunezuka (Sapporo, Japan) and Alok Ranjan (Austin, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of operating a plasma tool includes executing a plasma process on a wafer. Data associated with the plasma process are measured using a plurality of sensors while the plasma process is executed on the wafer. The plasma process is terminated at an endpoint time. A post-process fault detection is executed by det...