CONTEST
Competed
$10,000
This contest is closed.
Seth W Perry
technologyRucapillan IP
technologySub poena
technologyAmit Aswal
technologyAjinder Kaur
technologyCharu S
technologyRoopa V
technologyMilind Singhal
technologyBhupendra Singh
technologyYogesh Bansal
technologyKrish Dev
technologySaurabh s
technologyProblem
Patexia seeks prior art for US Patents 6,853,142 (‘142), and 7,604,716 (‘716), allegedly describing an apparatus and a method for strongly-ionized plasma generation in a magnetron sputtering machine. The process involves a chamber with an anode, a cathode made of material to be sputtered, a gas line and a power supply. Initially, a weakly ionized plasma is generated by ionizing the feed gas. After the weakly ionized plasma has been generated, a multi-step ionization process is used to produce additional ions, thus increasing the density of the plasma and forming a strongly-ionized plasma.
In the multi-step ionization process, additional ions are produced by (a) producing excited feed gas atoms (i.e., neutral, non-ionized, atoms that are at a higher energy state than the ground state) and then (b) ionizing the excited atoms. The power supply achieves the multi-step ionization process by applying pulses between the anode and cathode using the right magnitude and rise-time to generate excited atoms.
An ideal reference will describe a multi-step ionization process as applied to a magnetron sputtering device.
Figure 2. Apparatus for generating a strongly-ionized plasma (see US Patent 7,147,759)
Questions
| # | Question | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Was the source filed or published before November 4th, 2001? | 30 |
| 2 | If the source was not published before November 4th, 2001 was the source published before November 4th, 2002? | 10 |
| 3 | Does the source describe an apparatus for generating a strongly-ionized plasma which has an anode, a cathode made of material to be sputtered, a power supply, and a gas line? | 10 |
| 4 | Does the source describe a multi-step ionization process for generating a strongly-ionized plasma (i.e., a process that generates ions by: (a) producing excited atoms from ground state atoms and (b) then ionizing the excited atoms)? | 10 |
| 5 | Does the multi-step ionization process begin with ionizing a feed gas in a chamber to form a weakly-ionized plasma to substantially eliminate the probability of developing an arc in the chamber? | 10 |
| 6 | Is an electrical pulse (with the right magnitude and rise-time) applied between the anode and the cathode to the weakly ionized plasma to excite atoms and then ionize those excited atoms to generate a strongly-ionized plasma? | 10 |
| 7 | Does the electrical pulse have a rise-time of between 0.1 microseconds - 10 seconds? | 5 |
| 8 | Is the peak plasma density of the weakly-ionized plasma less than 10^12 cm^−3? | 5 |
| 9 | Is the peak plasma density of the strongly-ionized plasma greater than 10^12 cm^−3? | 5 |
| 10 | Can the dimension of the gap between the anode and the cathode be chosen in such a way to increase the production of excited atoms? | 5 |
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