Patents by Inventor Allen Altwood

Allen Altwood has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Front end wafer staging with wafer cassette turntables and on-the-fly wafer center finding
    Patent number: 6082950
    Abstract: A front end staging method and apparatus is provided to introduce and remove a set of wafers from a vacuum processing system. The system generally comprises a support platform, one or more wafer cassette turntables disposed on the platform, a wafer handler disposed adjacent the turntables, a wafer center finding device and a filter disposed to control particles in the vicinity of the wafers. The wafer cassette turntables are rotatably mounted to the support in the preferred embodiment. The processing system may also include one or more processing chambers, where each processing chamber defines a plurality of isolated processing regions therein. The wafer center finding device may include an optical sensor system including optimal emitters aligned with optical sensors.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 18, 1996
    Date of Patent: July 4, 2000
    Assignee: Applied Materials, Inc.
    Inventors: Allen Altwood, Kelly Colborne, Kevin Fairbairn, Christopher Lane, Hari K. Ponnekanti, Satish Sundar