The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 03, 2005
Filed:
Sep. 29, 2000
Jaideep Jain, San Jose, CA (US);
Stanley P. Liu, Milpitas, CA (US);
Janet Yi, Campbell, CA (US);
Eileen A. H. Wong, Cupertino, CA (US);
Sofya B. Malitsky, Mountain View, CA (US);
Thomas Hentschel, Discovery Bay, CA (US);
Jaideep Jain, San Jose, CA (US);
Stanley P. Liu, Milpitas, CA (US);
Janet Yi, Campbell, CA (US);
Eileen A. H. Wong, Cupertino, CA (US);
Sofya B. Malitsky, Mountain View, CA (US);
Thomas Hentschel, Discovery Bay, CA (US);
Novellus Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
A scheduler handles the various tasks to be performed on a wafer processing system as operations, with each operation having a predefined data structure. Operations that meet a set of requirements are added to an operation list. In the operation list, operations meeting another set of requirements are switched to the active state. Each active operation in the operation list is scheduled to run on the wafer processing system. Using structured operations to perform various tasks improves the extensibility and maintainability of the present scheduler. Further, the present scheduler can schedule several compatible operations at the same time by going through each operation in the operation list, and running those that are in the active state.