For more information, contact:

Tom Grove Advanced Energy Industries, Inc. (970) 224-6313

FORT COLLINS, Colorado (May 31, 1996)—Advanced Energy Industries, Inc. (AE) has been granted a United States patent for a technique that measures only signal magnitudes to determine radio frequency (RF) power and impedance. The importance of AE’s technique—and patent—is that it completely overcomes significant errors that heretofore occurred in the calculation of RF power and impedance.

Without this technique, power and impedance measurement equipment must measure not only low level RF signals, but also the phase angle between two or more signals. This phase measurement is especially difficult if the signals are small, or if the several signals are of widely differing magnitudes. In addition, at some critical (but typically used) impedances, a small error in the phase angle measurement can result in a large error in a calculated result. These difficulties can manifest themselves in significant errors in the resulting calculated power and impedance. AE’s new patent eliminates these common errors.

Founded in 1980, AE is a leading supplier of power conversion and control systems for plasma-based thin film production equipment. Our systems are critical to industrial processes that use gaseous plasmas to deposit or etch thin film layers on materials or substrates such as glass, silicon, and metals during the manufacture of semiconductors, data storage media, flat panel displays, and a host of other products.