Applied Materials, Inc.

Semitool, Inc.

Charles A Cummings

Mikael R Borjesson

A system for controlling the operation of apparatus for electroplating semiconductor substrates includes operating in a high mode of operation in which an off-the-shelf power supply provides current or voltage that is directly used to produce the channel control signal and in a low mode of operation in which the off-the-shelf power supply biases a circuit that provides a current or voltage to produce the channel control signal.

Plating power supply with headroom control and ethercat interface

A system for electroplating a substrate includes one or more controllers, with each controller having an FPGA with one or more output channels. A bulk power supply is connected to each controller. One or more transistors are associated with each output channel. An electroplating chamber has one or more electrodes, with each electrode connected to at least one output channel. The system may include a waveform capture and viewing circuit providing built-in process verification and diagnostic tools. The system may also have a throttle back mode which attempts to maintain proper anode current ratios by reducing setpoints of all anodes by the same percentage, if a fault condition causes a reduction in current to one of the anodes. Blackbox logging may also optionally be used for recording selected data values into a circular buffer having a selected amount of memory.

Substrate plating apparatus with multi-channel field programmable gate array

An acoustic liquid level detector system includes, a) a first acoustic wave guide; b) an acoustic wave transmitter and an acoustic wave receiver operably associated with the first acoustic wave guide to transfer acoustic waves between, i) the acoustic transmitter and receiver; and ii) the first acoustic wave guide; c) a second acoustic wave guide; d) an angled juncture interconnecting the first acoustic wave guide to the second acoustic wave guide; e) a primary acoustic reflector provided in the angled juncture to angularly reflect acoustic waves between the first and second acoustic wave guides; and f) a secondary acoustic reflector positioned to directly reflect an acoustic wave emanating from the acoustic wave transmitter to the acoustic wave receiver. The second acoustic wave guide is provided with a plurality of longitudinally spaced orifices to facilitate ingress of liquid and flow of a cleaning purge gas outwardly of the second acoustic wave guide. A purge gas port is provided in the first acoustic wave guide for injecting purge gas into the system.

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Kalispell, MT, United States of America

Charles A Cummings