Dr. Brown is a patent agent in Townsend's Electronics and Software Practice Group. Dr. Brown's areas of expertise include semiconductors, material science, optics, software and electronics.
Dr. Brown has experience protecting intellectual property and performing research in the areas of materials science, optics and physics. Exemplary analytical tools and phenomena include:
- dark-field and bright-field optical microscopy
- inelastic optical scattering - Raman spectroscopy
- Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)
- lasers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs)
- optical waveguides and couplers
- spectroscopic ellipsometry
- interferometry
- scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
- electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS)
- low energy electron diffraction (LEED)
- Auger electron spectroscopy (AES)
- numerical methods and their implementation within software
Applications within the field of semiconductor manufacturing technology involve:
- chemical mechanical polishing (CMP)
- etching
- plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD)
- high-density plasma chemical vapor deposition (HDP-CVD)
- sub-atmospheric chemical vapor deposition (SACVD)
- physical vapor deposition (PVD)
- epitaxial deposition (EPI)
- rapid thermal processing (RTP)
- atomic layer deposition (ALD)
- process sequence integration (PSI)
- photolithography
- photoresist coating and developing systems
- optical metrology - including critical dimension (CD) and overlay measurements
- defect inspection
- substrate cleaning
- rotary run-out metrology
Dr. Brown has over ten years of experience developing semiconductor and magnetic-media manufacturing equipment. Prior to joining Townsend, Dr. Brown worked as a process engineer, systems engineer and research scientist.