US 11353381

I'll search for information on this specific patent number, including any litigation activity.

Let me check for any litigation or PTAB proceedings and verify the assignment records.

US Patent 11,353,381 B1 — Analyst Summary

Search note: I could not locate any USPTO litigation (district court), PTAB, or CAFC 2026 docket entry naming patent 11,353,381. My searches returned the patent's bibliographic/legal-status pages and unrelated Applied Materials litigation from other matters/years. There is no authoritative indication of current litigation activity for this patent; treat any absence-of-litigation statement as "not found," not as confirmed proof of none.

Bibliographic Data

Assignee caveat: The Google Patents record shows a 2022-12-30 reassignment to "LEVITATE TECHNOLOGIES, INC." with the assignor listed as "Enhance Technologies, LLC." That chain does not align with the semiconductor-inspection subject matter and appears to be an assignment-record data artifact. I do not have authoritative confirmation that Levitate Technologies holds rights in this patent; the reliable record is Applied Materials, Inc. as original assignee.

Abstract

A detector disc includes a disc body having a bottom disc and a top cover with a first aperture. A sensor is disposed inside the disc body, positioned to be exposed to an external environment via the first aperture. The solid-state sensor detects levels of chemical gas contaminants and outputs a detection signal. A microcontroller on the PCB generates measurement data from the detected levels embodied in the detection signal. A wireless communication circuit on the PCB transmits the measurement data wirelessly to a wireless access point device.

Independent Claims — Plain Language

Claim 1 (detector disc apparatus). A disc-shaped body made of a bottom disc plus a top cover, where the cover has both a sidewall attached to the bottom disc and a first aperture. Inside the body: (a) a sensor positioned to be exposed to the outside through the first aperture, able to detect chemical gas contaminant levels and output a detection signal; (b) a microcontroller coupled to the sensor that turns that detection signal into measurement data; and (c) a wireless communication circuit coupled to the microcontroller that wirelessly sends the measurement data to a wireless access point (WAP). Put simply: a wafer-like disc that sniffs the air and radios out the results.

Claim 12 (detector disc using sorbent sampling). An alternative, non-electronic-sensing approach. A substrate disc carries a sorbent tube; one end of the tube is capped and the other end is open. A MEMS (micro-electromechanical system) pump on the substrate disc has an air tube attached to the open end and forces ambient air into the sorbent tube; the pump automatically shuts off after a calibrated time period following activation. A microcontroller on the substrate disc is coupled to the pump and activates it. Put simply: a disc that traps air samples on an adsorbent tube using a tiny timed pump, with the tube later removed and analyzed (e.g., by gas chromatography).

Claim 16 (method of in-situ measurement). A first robot moves the detector disc from a storage location, through a factory interface, into a load lock of a processing system. The disc includes a sensor that detects chemical gas contaminants in air and a wireless communication circuit coupled to the sensor. A second robot then moves the disc from the load lock through a transfer chamber into a processing chamber. The sensor detects contaminant levels in any of the storage location, factory interface, load lock, transfer chamber, or processing chamber, and the wireless circuit transmits measurement data indicative of those detected levels to a WAP device. Put simply: using the fab's own wafer-handling robots to ferry the disc through the tool and map contamination location-by-location.

Dependent Claim Highlights

• Cl. 2–3: ppm-level detection (AMCs/VOCs); solid-state sensor response time — 50% of concentration within 10 s, 90% within 30 s.
• Cl. 4: PCB in the disc interior; sidewall encloses the PCB and has an opening for connector interfaces.
• Cl. 5: Serial communication interface (SPI or I²C) between sensor and PCB.
• Cl. 6–7: Second aperture + axial fan on the PCB moving air across the sensor; third PCB aperture forming an in/out airflow path.
• Cl. 8–9: Sets of four apertures, sensors, fans in matched arrangement.
• Cl. 10: Memory card, battery, and power manager with booster converter.
• Cl. 11: Disc thickness ~6–9 mm; diameter ~190–320 mm (wafer-compatible form factor).
• Cl. 13–15: Sorbent-tube variants — clamp attachment, second tube/second MEMS pump, and defined sampling locations.
• Cl. 17–20: Location-by-location transmission; return-trip measurement; sensor calibration to a baseline outside the factory interface; signal conditioning → ADC → discrete-value measurement data.

Family / Related Filings

WO2021252463A1; TWI826793B and TWI887861B (Taiwan); JP7398013B2 and JP7704822B2 (Japan); KR102540950B1 (Korea); CN115667919B (China).

Uncertainty statement: Bibliographic fields, claims, and abstract above are drawn from the authoritative patent text. Assignee/ownership status and any litigation posture are the areas where I have lower confidence — the "Levitate Technologies" listing appears inconsistent and I did not find corroborating USPTO assignment or docket records in my searches.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11353381 across patent litigation databases.

Let me dig deeper into litigation-specific databases.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent No. 11,353,381

Bottom line: I found no litigation involving US Patent No. 11,353,381. Based on the sources searched, the patent — as of the date of my searches — appears to be litigation-free in U.S. district courts, the Federal Circuit, the ITC, and the PTAB.

Patent identification (verified, interpreted literally)

Before reporting on litigation, I confirmed the patent's identity so as not to sweep in similar numbers:

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11353381/en

What I searched and what I found

1. Google Patents "Events" / litigation section — The events timeline for US11353381B1 lists only prosecution, priority, assignment, and publication events (e.g., the 2020-06-19 assignment to Applied Materials, Inc.; the 2022-12-30 reassignment to Levitate Technologies, Inc.). It lists no "Litigation" entries, which Google Patents normally populates when a patent appears in a U.S. lawsuit docket. (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11353381/en)

2. Justia Patents — The Justia page for patent 11353381 displays the claims and description but shows no litigation/docket section. (https://patents.justia.com/patent/11353381)

3. Docket Alarm / CourtListener (PACER-derived) — Searches on the patent number and on the patent's subject matter (Applied Materials, "detector disc," "factory interface," chemical gas contaminant monitoring) did not surface any case naming this patent. The Applied Materials litigation that did surface (e.g., Applied Materials, Inc. v. Demaray LLC, N.D. Cal. Case No. 5:20-cv-09341 and 5:20-cv-05676) involves U.S. Patent Nos. 7,544,276 and 7,381,657 — different patents, different technology (PVD pulsed-DC power supplies). These are not related to the '381 patent.

4. Unified Patents litigation portal — Searches for the patent number on Unified Patents' litigation/insights pages returned no litigation or IPR entries tied to US 11,353,381. (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist)

5. PTAB — No inter partes review, PGR, or other AIA trial proceeding referencing the '381 patent was identified.

Important caveat / flag on one data point

The Google Patents page lists the current assignee as including both "Applied Materials Inc" and "Levitate Technologies Inc." This is almost certainly a data artifact, not evidence of a relevant transfer or dispute:

• The reassignment entry states that on 2022-12-30 rights were assigned to "LEVITATE TECHNOLOGIES, INC." by assignor "Enhance Technologies, LLC" — an entity unrelated to the '381 patent's inventors or Applied Materials.
• Levitate Technologies, Inc. is known in the patent record for exoskeleton / head- and arm-support harness technology (e.g., B25J and A61H classifications) — wholly unrelated to semiconductor gas-contaminant detection discs.

I would not treat this as a litigation-relevant owner change without verifying the underlying USPTO assignment record.

Required format for cases (none to report)

Because no cases were located, there are no entries to populate for plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome/status. Stating a case here would be fabrication, so I am explicitly declining to do so.

Limitations on this search (stated per your "high confidence" instruction)

I want to be transparent about the confidence level and scope:

• My searches were web-index-based, not direct, exhaustive queries of PACER or a complete litigation database. Google Patents, Justia, Docket Alarm, CourtListener, and Unified Patents are good proxies, but they are not guaranteed complete — very recent filings (particularly in the last few weeks) may not yet be indexed.
• The patent is relatively young (granted June 7, 2022) and is held by a large operating company (Applied Materials) that does not appear to be an active patent monetization/assertion entity, which reduces — but does not eliminate — the likelihood of assertion litigation.
• I could not independently confirm or rule out unindexed or very recent filings, or non-U.S. proceedings tied to the foreign family members (WO2021252463A1; JP7398013B2/JP7704822B2; KR102540950B1; CN115667919B; TWI826793B/TWI887861B).

Conclusion: No known litigation involving US 11,353,381 was found. If you need a definitive, PACER-level negative, I'd recommend a direct Docket Navigator or Lex Machina patent-level query, or a CourtListener RECAP docket search, as a follow-up — those are the tools that can conclusively rule out a very recently filed case.

PTAB Proceedings Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,353,381

Prepared 2026-09-29. Patent: "Portable disc to measure chemical gas contaminants within semiconductor equipment and clean room." Application 16/946,195, filed 2020-06-09, granted 2022-06-07, anticipated expiration 2040-06-09.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — zero active, zero with claims invalidated, zero with claims sustained, zero settled, zero with institution denied — which means no claim of US 11,353,381 has ever been tested at the PTAB, no petitioner estoppel exists for a defendant to inherit, and no Final Written Decision exists for a defendant to borrow. The patent is neither "hardened by surviving IPRs" nor "crippled by canceled claims"; it is simply un-adjudicated, and a defendant must build its own invalidity record from scratch.

Canonical source. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal, most recent ingest) returns no AIA trial proceedings. Per the task instructions, that is the default and controlling answer.

Independent verification performed today (2026-09-29). I ran multiple web searches designed to surface any proceeding the ODP ingest may have missed — including queries pairing "11353381" / "11,353,381" with "IPR," "PGR," "Patent Trial and Appeal Board," and with Applied Materials. I also reviewed the full Google Patents record, which contains a "Cited By (3)" and "Cited By"/"Citations" section and an assignment-history timeline. No IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding number was surfaced, and no petitioner was identified. I flag explicitly that this is a negative search result, not an affirmative certification; the authoritative check is a live PTAB E2E / USPTO PatentCenter query on the patent number.

Sources consulted: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11353381/en · https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-11353381-B1

No proceedings to itemize

Because the count is zero, there is no proceeding to render in the ### {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} format. I am not going to invent a docket number, a petitioner, a panel, or an institution date to fill the template. Two adjacent items from the record are not PTAB proceedings and should not be mistaken for them:

1. WO2024254097A1 — third-party citation, not a challenge. The Google Patents "Cited By" table lists WO2024254097A1 (priority date "2023-0…", record truncated) as citing US 11,353,381. A citing publication is a prior-art-landscape lead only. It is not an IPR/PGR petitioner and it establishes no estoppel, no claim construction, and no validity finding. If the record is complete, this is a third party developing in the same AMC/VOC gas-detection space — worth pulling in full for a § 102/§ 103 mapping exercise.
2. Assignment chain — not a proceeding. The record shows the patent assigned to Levitate Technologies, Inc. on 2022-12-30, with Enhance Technologies, LLC as the assignor, and Applied Materials, Inc. as original assignee. This is a reassignment trail through an intermediary, not an adversarial proceeding. It matters for a defendant in one practical way: confirm the current owner and any real parties in interest before treating Applied Materials as the adverse party — a demand letter or suit may come from Levitate or a further downstream entity, and that affects § 315(b) service dates, RPI/privy analysis, and who you negotiate with.

One gap I want to name rather than paper over: the ODP block covers AIA trial proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM). It does not cover ex parte or inter partes reexamination, which are handled in the Central Reexamination Unit and produce certificates of cancellation that are just as lethal. My searches surfaced nothing there either, but I cannot confirm a negative on the reexam record from the data provided. Verify the reexamination record separately (PatentCenter → "Reexam" tab) before you conclude the claims have never been administratively reviewed.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 20 claims are UNTESTED. Nothing has been canceled, nothing has been confirmed, nothing has been narrowed by amendment. Mapping the claims to the specification: claims 1–11 cover the sensor-based detector disc (disc body, top cover with first aperture, sensor, microcontroller, wireless communication circuit; dependent claims add the serial interface under claim 5, the axial fan / second-and-third aperture airflow paths under claims 6–7, the aperture-and-fan arrays under claims 8–9, the memory card + battery + booster-converter power manager under claim 10, and the 6–9 mm thickness / 190–320 mm diameter form factor under claim 11). Claims 12–15 cover the sorbent-tube variant (substrate disc, capped-at-one-end sorbent tube, MEMS pump with air tube, auto-shutoff after a calibrated period; claim 14 adds a second tube and second pump, claim 15 recites the storage location / factory interface / load lock / transfer chamber / processing chamber environments). Claims 16–20 cover the two-robot method of carrying the disc through the tool and wirelessly reporting measurement data, including the per-location transmission split of claim 17, the return-trip second measurement of claim 18, the external-air calibration of claim 19, and the signal-condition → ADC → discrete-value conversion of claim 20. For a defendant, the absence of a PTAB record means the entire claim set is live and presumptively valid, and every one of those limitations is an unbriefed battleground.

Estoppel landscape: nothing is barred, and nothing is barred for you either. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches only after an IPR reaches a Final Written Decision. With no FWD, no petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is estopped from anything, in either the PTAB or the district court. That cuts both ways. The good news: your prior-art palette is completely unfettered — you can use every patent, printed publication, product manual, and (in district court) system prior art and on-sale/public-use theory that a petitioner would ordinarily lose access to. The bad news: there is no adverse ruling to ride, no adopted claim construction to inherit, and no petitioner-funded expert record to reuse. Two hard gates remain, and they are the ones that actually matter here: (a) PGR is time-barred — the nine-month post-grant window under § 321(c) closed on approximately 2022-12-07, so § 101 eligibility, § 112 written description/enablement, and § 112 indefiniteness grounds cannot be raised at the PTAB at all and must be litigated in district court; and (b) § 315(b) — if you have been served with a complaint alleging infringement, your one-year clock is running, and it runs from the service date, not from the filing of the suit or from any demand letter.

Pattern signals: none of the usual escalation markers are present. No serial petitioner has filed multiple IPRs against this patent (no petitioner exists). The patent owner has not pursued PTAB appeals, because there is no FWD to appeal — no CAFC docket number is available to cite, and I found none. I found no indication that Unified Patents, RPX, or any other defensive aggregator has taken a position on this patent; typically such an entity would appear as petitioner on a widely-asserted patent, and its absence is a meaningful negative. Finally, the assignment movement to Levitate Technologies, Inc. on 2022-12-30 in the same year the patent granted is a monetization signal worth weighing: patents that move to a non-practicing holder commonly precede assertion campaigns, and assertion is what eventually attracts IPRs. The absence of PTAB activity is thus a timing artifact of an un-asserted (or newly asserted) patent — not evidence that the claims are strong. Well-asserted patents in a litigious field like semiconductor process control reliably attract petitions; if this patent is now being asserted, expect a first IPR within roughly 12 months of service and expect it to be the only clean shot, given that General Plastic factors will weigh against serial petitions.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the negative before you rely on it. Run the patent number through PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) and PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/) and separately check the reexamination tab. CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) is the fastest cross-check for any CAFC appeal or district court docket tied to the patent. The ODP block and my searches agree on zero, but a live query takes minutes and closes the loop.
2. There is no FWD to link or quote. Because no Final Written Decision exists, I cannot point you to a disposition, cannot quote a panel's reasoning, and cannot tell you which claims were canceled — because none were. Any briefing that asserts an IPR outcome for this patent is asserting something that does not exist. Treat a demand letter that recites PTAB history as a credibility signal about the sender.
3. If you are a defendant, calendar the § 315(b) date immediately. The one-year window from service is the single most consequential deadline on your docket. Because PGR is unavailable (window closed ~2022-12-07), your PTAB options are IPR only, restricted to § 102 and § 103 over patents and printed publications. Plan your § 101 and § 112 challenges for the district court from day one.
4. Build the invalidity case around the claim families, not a single lead reference. The claims split into three distinct inventive cores — (i) sensor + wireless disc with the aperture/fan airflow architecture (claims 1–11), (ii) sorbent tube + MEMS pump with auto-shutoff (claims 12–15), and (iii) the two-robot transport-and-report method (claims 16–20). Each is a separate § 103 story, and the prior art you need for claim 6's second-and-third aperture airflow path is not the prior art you need for claim 12's calibrated shutoff. Pull WO2024254097A1 in full as a starting lead for the sensor/vapor-detection landscape, then extend backward through the AMC/VOC monitoring and wafer-shaped sensor-artifact literature — the "instrumented wafer/sensor disc that travels through the tool like a product wafer" concept has a deep prior-art tail (the Google Patents record itself couples this patent to integrated process-condition sensing wafers such as KR102387281B1 and WO2005109474A1).
5. Preserve the design-around option. With every claim live and no construction on record, terms like "positioned to be exposed to an external environment via the first aperture," "automatically shut off after a calibrated time period," and "measurement data comprises information indicative of the detected levels" are all unconstrued. Obtaining a claim-construction ruling (or a strong § 112 indefiniteness position on the "calibrated time period" limitation in claim 12) may be cheaper and faster than invalidating the patent outright.
6. Re-check quarterly. This is a live, assigned, un-adjudicated patent. A first petition could be filed and not appear in my data for weeks. A recurring PTAB E2E watch on the patent number — set against your litigation deadlines — is the correct standing posture.

I'll investigate the assignment record for US 11353381 using the authoritative patent text plus live searches of the USPTO assignment records and related sources.

Let me dig deeper into the specific assignment records and the entity identities.

I was able to retrieve the authoritative patent text plus corroborating sources, but I hit the tool-call limit before pulling the raw reel/frame numbers from the Assignment Center. Below is what the record supports, with the gaps flagged explicitly rather than filled in.

Inventors

Six named inventors, all of whom assigned their rights to Applied Materials, Inc. under the assignment recorded 2020-06-19 ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST," assignors listed on the record):

• Pattern check: The 2020-06-19 record shows all six inventors conveying to Applied Materials in a single instrument — the normal employee-assignment flow for a large operating company. I found no evidence of inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, and no subsequent inventor-initiated filings suggesting a fire-sale. That "mass-departure" tell is not present here.
• Note the mixed US/India inventor roster, consistent with Applied Materials operating a large engineering site in India.

Original assignee

Applied Materials, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA).

• Named on the issued patent: Yes — it is the sole original assignee on the face of US 11,353,381 and is the applicant on the entire family (WO2021252463A1, JP7398013B2, KR102540950B1, CN115667919B, TWI826793B).
• Primary line of business: The world's largest semiconductor-equipment manufacturer — deposition, etch, ion implant, CMP, and related fab tooling. The claimed detector disc is an internal metrology/contamination-monitoring consumable that is used inside Applied Materials' own processing systems (factory interface, load locks, transfer chamber, process chambers), so the assignee's products directly embody the environment the claims operate in.
• Current status: Operating and public (NASDAQ: AMAT). Not acquired, not dissolved, not in bankruptcy. No 10-K/8-K event indicating a sale of this asset was found.

Assignment timeline

Data limitation: I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record from the USPTO Assignment Center within this session. Google Patents' legal-events table (my authoritative source here) does not include reel/frame for these entries. I am reporting the record as it stands and flagging the missing fields rather than inventing them.

2020-06-19 (executed; the patent's later recording) — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Holeyannavar, Devendra Channappa; Hruzek, Dean C.; Ramachandraiah, Arunkumar; Hudgens, Jeffrey C.; Nara, Shivaraj Manjunath; Reuter, Paul B.
• Assignee: Applied Materials, Inc.
• Correspondent: Not retrieved (Assignment Center not queried successfully).
• Context: Standard employee invention assignment — the inventors conveyed their rights to their employer. This is the only bona fide link in the chain.

2022-12-30 (recorded) — Reel/Frame not retrieved

• Conveyance: Assignment
• Assignor: Enhance Technologies, LLC
• Assignee: Levitate Technologies, Inc.
• Correspondent: Not retrieved.
• Context: Anomalous. This record does not connect to the Applied Materials chain: the assignor is Enhance Technologies, LLC — an entity that never appears as an assignee of US 11,353,381 in any visible record. There is no recorded Applied Materials → Enhance Technologies transfer. The Jan-2022…Dec-2022 Enhance → Levitate transfer is independently corroborated as a San Diego exoskeleton/arm-support IP consolidation (both entities share the address 9540 Waples St., Suite F, San Diego, CA 92121; inventor Mark C. Doyle is common to both; the equivalent EP transfer registered 2023-03-21). Nothing ties either entity to semiconductors or clean-room gas monitoring. I flag this as an apparent USPTO assignment-recording or mapping error, not a real transfer of this patent — but note that Google Patents consequently lists both Applied Materials and Levitate Technologies as "Current Assignee."

No other recorded assignments exist. There is no chassis-level Apple-style securitization chain, no transfer to a licensing LLC, no patent-holding subsidiary reorg, and no defensive-aggregator terminal transfer visible.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11353381
    2020 : Filed 9 Jun 2020 by Applied Materials
         : Inventors assign rights to Applied Materials
    2022 : Patent issued 7 Jun 2022
         : Anomalous record from Enhance to Levitate

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present (as to the genuine chain). The only operating→third-party record is the 2022-12-30 Enhance → Levitate entry, and it is defective on its face: the named assignor was never a recorded owner of this patent. Levitate/Enhance are a shared-address San Diego pair (9540 Waples St., Suite F) with a single principal (Mark C. Doyle) and no semiconductor products — which is exactly the shell signature — but because the record does not attach to any Applied Materials→Enhance conveyance, I cannot treat it as a real transfer of this patent. Marked unclear, not "present."

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither Applied Materials, Enhance Technologies, LLC, nor Levitate Technologies, Inc. appears on the standard NPE lists (Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation, Spangenberg entities). No RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff match surfaced.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not retrievable. I could not obtain the correspondent of record for either entry. On the visible record there are only two assignments, so even a match would be a weak (single-recurrence) signal. Not a finding.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. No chain of LLCs stepping the patent along in <24 months. At most one (defective) downstream record.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming US 11,353,381 was found; the patent's "Cited By" section shows only prosecution-style citations (e.g., a 2023-dated WO publication), not litigation.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Applied Materials has not filed Chapter 7/11; no sold-in-proceedings evidence for this asset.

7. Privateering — not present. No SEC-disclosure or press evidence of Applied Materials funding an NPE to assert against competitors.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. Chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN.

Verdict

Insufficient data.

The only bona fide recorded assignment affecting US 11,353,381 is the 2020-06-19 inventor→Applied Materials, Inc. conveyance (Google Patents legal events), and the patent's entire international family remains in Applied Materials' name. The sole post-issuance entry — the 2022-12-30 record naming Enhance Technologies, LLC → Levitate Technologies, Inc. — is anomalous because Enhance never appears as a recorded owner of this patent (no Applied Materials→Enhance link exists), and the same Enhance→Levitate transfer is independently corroborated as a San Diego exoskeleton-IP consolidation. With only the original assignment genuinely of record, the correct classification is Insufficient data, and the operating original assignee Applied Materials appears to remain the owner.

Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 11,353,381); legacy search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. You should re-pull both reel/frame entries and the correspondent of record there; if the 2022-12-30 record indeed lists application 16/946,195, obtaining its correspondent and the assignment's property schedule will confirm or refute the recording-error hypothesis, which is the single most important open item in this chain.

I'll start by locating the authoritative record for this exact patent number and its cited prior art.

I have the patent text. Now let me pull the "References Cited" (front-page US patent documents) for US11353381B1 specifically, rather than pages that merely cite it.

Let me retrieve the complete front-page citation list and details on the most claim-relevant references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,353,381 B1

0. Methodology and sourcing caveat (read first)

You asked me to search the USPTO database for patent number 11353381. I was not able to query USPTO PatentCenter / the USPTO full-text search API directly with the tools available; the searches returned third-party mirrors that reproduce the USPTO face-of-patent data (Justia's "Referenced Cited," PubChem's citation block, and Google Patents' citation tables). I flag this because patent-number transcription errors are common, so here is exactly what those records show and exactly what I could and could not verify.

I also note the strict rule you set: I have not auto-corrected any identifier. The number as given (11353381) matches the record (US 11,353,381 B1), so no correction was needed.

Two important limitations on the answer below, stated up front:

1. The citation list is large (~55+ items) and my sources truncated it. Justia's list cut off mid-entry at "20040035183 … February 26, 2004," and PubChem's list cut off at "US-2014223997-A1." I therefore cannot represent the list as complete.
2. I do not have the full text of most of the cited references. Where I cannot verify a reference's substance, I say so explicitly rather than invent a description. Only two cited references had their titles confirmed by the search results (US 4,387,359 and, indirectly, the MEMS family around US 8,683,847).

1. The patent under analysis (confirmed)

Source record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11353381/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/11353381

2. The references cited on the face of US 11,353,381 B1

These are the "References Cited / U.S. Patent Documents" entries. Citation format: number — grant/publication date — named inventor (as listed).

U.S. patents

U.S. patent application publications

Other cited documents

Sources: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11353381 ; https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/patent/US-11353381-B1

Forward citations (expressly NOT prior art): the record shows "Cited By (3)," led by WO 2024/254097 A1 (priority 2023). These post-date the 2020-06-09 priority date by years and cannot be §102 art against this patent; they are evidence of the patent's technical significance, not anticipation.

3. Two observations that materially affect the §102 analysis

(a) Two cited references post-date the critical date. US 10,763,920 (granted 2020-09-01) and US 11,054,347 (granted 2021-07-06) both issued after the 2020-06-09 priority date. Neither can be §102(a)(1) art. If either is to be applied at all, it must be as §102(a)(2) art — i.e., a U.S. patent or application publication that was effectively filed before 2020-06-09. Their appearance on the face of the patent strongly suggests they were cited for exactly that purpose. Every other cited item pre-dates the critical date and is potential §102(a)(1) art.

(b) "Cited" ≠ "applied." A large bloc of the listed references is classic 1970s–1990s solid-state gas-sensor art (Taguchi-type, oxide/oxygen-sensor, thin-film and micro-machined sensing elements). This is the profile of background/IDS art cited to characterize the sensing element, not art that was applied to reject the claims. The patent issued with all 20 claims intact, which means nothing on this list was found to anticipate or render obvious the claims as a whole.

4. §102 relevance assessment by claim group

Because I do not hold the full text of the cited references, the mapping below is preliminary and explicitly hedged. I have grouped the claims by the feature each turns on and identified which cited references are the most plausible §102 candidates for that feature.

Claim 1 (independent — detector disc)

Elements: (i) disc body with bottom disc + top cover having a first aperture and a sidewall attached to the bottom disc; (ii) sensor inside, exposed through the aperture; (iii) sensor detects chemical gas contaminants, outputs a detection signal; (iv) microcontroller generating measurement data; (v) wireless communication circuit transmitting to a WAP.

• Assessment: no single cited reference appears to disclose all of elements (i)–(v). The cited list contains gas sensors (ii–iii) but I found no cited reference combining a substrate/disc-format package with an on-board microcontroller and a wireless-to-WAP transmitter. On the evidence available, claim 1 appears not anticipated by the face-citation list.
• Closest conceptual candidates for the "sensor-in-a-disc, remotely read" idea are US 10,763,920 and US 11,054,347 — but see §3(a): they post-date the critical date and would need an earlier effective filing date to be available as §102(a)(2) art.

Claims 2 and 3 (sensor sensitivity/specification)

Elements: ppm-level detection of AMCs/VOCs; 50% of concentration within 10 s and 90% within 30 s; solid-state sensor.

• These are the claims with real §102 exposure on this list. The dense block of solid-state/oxide sensing-element patents is directed squarely at this subject matter — e.g. US 4,387,359 (Tien, 1983-06-07), confirmed by the search to be titled "Titania oxygen sensor with chrome oxide compensator"; also US 4,457,161 (Iwanaga), US 4,169,369 / 4,358,951 (Chang), US 5,659,127 (Shie), US 5,675,070 (Gelperin), US 5,969,231 (Qu), US 6,059,937 (Koh), and the MEMS-family US 8,683,847 (Moon).
• Caution: claims 2 and 3 are dependent claims and incorporate claim 1. A cited sensor reference could not anticipate them standing alone unless the reference also supplied the claim-1 disc/wireless architecture. The honest reading is that this art is more naturally §103 (obviousness) material against the sensor sub-features than §102 anticipation of the dependent claims as a whole.

Claims 4–10 (PCB layout, apertures, serial interface I²C/SPI, axial fan, airflow, multi-sensor arrays, memory card, power manager/booster)

Elements: PCB inside the disc; sidewall opening to connector interfaces; serial (SPI/I²C) sensor interface; second aperture + axial fan moving air across the sensor; third PCB aperture for through-airflow; arrays of four apertures/sensors/fans; memory card; battery + booster-converter power manager.

• Assessment: I found no cited reference that discloses the aperture/fan/airflow architecture (second aperture, third aperture, through-fan airflow) or the serial-interface limitation. The older sensor patents in the list do not appear to address instrument packaging in a wafer-form factor. These claims appear to be the strongest part of the patent relative to the face-citation list.

Claims 11 and 13 (form factor)

Elements: disc body thickness 6–9 mm; diameter ~190–320 mm; sorbent tube attached with a clamp.

• Assessment: a 6–9 mm / 190–320 mm disc is essentially the 300 mm semiconductor wafer envelope; wafer-handling dimensional art is extremely well developed, though I found no cited reference in this list that discloses the dimensions as such. Worth noting as a potential §103 vulnerability from the general wafer-handling art rather than from these citations.

Claims 12 and 14 (independent/dependent — sorbent tube + MEMS pump)

Elements: substrate disc; sorbent tube (capped first end, open second end); MEMS pump with air tube forcing ambient air into the sorbent tube; automatic shut-off after a calibrated time period; microcontroller activating the pump; second sorbent tube + second MEMS pump.

• Assessment: this is the most interesting gap. Sorbent-tube air sampling with a timed personal-sampling pump is a long-established analytical-chemistry practice, and MEMS pumps are well known. However, nothing in the face-citation list retrieved appears to be directed to sorbent-tube sampling with a MEMS pump in a disc format. If anticipation exists here, it is more likely to be found in non-cited sorbent-sampling/personal-monitor art than in the cited list. On the available evidence, claims 12–15 appear not anticipated by these citations.

Claims 15 and 16–19 (method claims — robot transfer through the tool; WAP transmission; calibration)

Elements: first robot moves the disc from storage → factory interface → load lock; second robot moves it load lock → transfer chamber → process chamber; detect AMC levels in at least one of those locations; wirelessly transmit to a WAP; per-location transmission segments; return-trip detection; calibration outside the factory interface.

• Assessment: none of the cited references appears to disclose the robotic transit of a sensor-carrying disc through a semiconductor cluster tool with location-correlated detection and WAP reporting. The cited list is sensing-element art, not fab/logistics art. Claims 16–20 appear not anticipated by the face-citation list.

Claim 20 (signal chain)

Elements: receive detection signal → condition (signal conditioner) → ADC → convert to measurement data in ppm.

• Assessment: the individual operations are generic instrumentation signal processing, but the claim is tied to the claim-1 disc. No cited reference retrieved combines these steps with the disc architecture.

5. Additional art I encountered that is arguably MORE relevant than the face citations (clearly flagged as not a face citation)

Because the face-citation list is largely sensing-element art, it is worth noting art I encountered in the searches that bears directly on the disc-with-sensor-regions + networked readout concept, even though it is not on the face of US 11,353,381 B1:

• WO 2005/052598 A2 — "Sensor system and methods for improved quantitation of environmental parameters," General Electric, inventors Potyrailo et al., filed 2004-11-23, published 2005-06-09 (PCT/US2004/039213). Discloses a disc/optical-medium carrying sensor regions, read out to quantify environmental parameters, with network-connected remote readout. Verified: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/fe/22/d6/c0756313e61909/WO2005052598A2.pdf
• US 2007/0146715 A1 — "Sensor systems for quantification of physical parameters, chemical and biochemical volatile and nonvolatile compounds in fluids," General Electric. Discloses disc-shaped substrates with an array of sensor spots, automated scanned readout, threshold comparison, and network status reporting. Verified: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2007/0146715.html

These two references are pertinent to the "disc as a sensor carrier that reports over a network" concept underlying claims 1 and 16–19, and they pre-date the critical date comfortably. I did not find them listed among the face citations — worth confirming against the full USPTO "References Cited" list, which my sources truncated.

6. Bottom line

1. The exact patent is confirmed: US 11,353,381 B1, App. 16/946,195, filed/priority 2020-06-09, granted 2022-06-07, Applied Materials (later recorded to Levitate Technologies, Inc.).
2. The face-citation list is dominated by 1970s–1990s solid-state gas-sensor art (35+ U.S. patents), plus a smaller set of U.S. publications and two foreign documents (WO 85/01351 A1; JP 2004-340945 A).
3. Most likely §102 exposure: the sensor-characterizing dependent claims (2, 3, and inferentially the sensor aspects of 1), via references such as US 4,387,359 (Tien, 1983), US 4,457,161 (Iwanaga, 1984), US 5,659,127 (Shie, 1997), US 5,969,231 (Qu, 1999), US 6,059,937 (Koh, 2000) and the MEMS-family US 8,683,847 (Moon, 2014) — but these are more coherently §103 material than §102 anticipation of the dependent claims, which incorporate all of claim 1.
4. No single cited reference, on the evidence retrieved, discloses the full combination of claim 1, claims 4–11 (aperture/fan/airflow/PCB architecture), claims 12–15 (sorbent tube + MEMS pump + timed auto-shutoff), or claims 16–20 (robotic transit through the tool with location-correlated WAP reporting).
5. Two cited references post-date the 2020-06-09 critical date — US 10,763,920 (2020-09-01) and US 11,054,347 (2021-07-06) — and can only be §102(a)(2) art if effectively filed earlier.

What I could not do (stated plainly)

• I could not query USPTO PatentCenter/PATENTSCOPE directly; the citation data came from USPTO-derived mirrors.
• The citation list is incomplete in every source I reached (truncated at 2004/0035183 on Justia; at 2014/0223997 on PubChem). A definitive per-reference §102 mapping is not possible without (a) the complete face-citation list and (b) the full text of each of ~55 references. Where I lacked verified substance, I declined to supply a description rather than guess.

I'll research the prior art landscape relevant to this patent's claims before building the § 103 analysis.

Good — I now have candidate art. Let me verify a few specific references, including the wafer-like gas-sensor art and the sorbent-tube/MEMS-pump sampling art.

Let me check the patent's own cited references and any closely-related art on the Justia record.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,353,381 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

1. Evidentiary scope (read this first)

The page excerpt supplied to me does not contain a substantive prior-art listing. It contains only: Google's algorithmic "Prior art keywords" (disc, sensor, detector, pcb, disposed), the prior-art/priority date (2020-06-09), and a truncated "Cited By (3)" list that breaks off mid-entry at WO2024254097A1 (en) … 2023-0…. That entry is a 2023-priority forward citation — it cannot be § 102/§ 103 art against a 2020 filing. I therefore could not perform the analysis from the page's prior-art section alone, and I have not invented an IDS. Instead I built the grounds below from prior-art references I could independently locate and date, including the documents cited on the face of this patent (retrievable via the NLM/PubChem patent record for US-11353381-B1, which lists the front-page "References Cited" — a long body of gas-sensor patents running from US 3,950,980 through US 8,683,847) and the family's search reports.

This does not contradict the earlier summary section — it supplements it. The prior summary's uncertainty about assignee status and litigation posture stands unchanged; nothing below depends on the "Levitate Technologies" listing, which I agree appears to be an assignment-record artifact.

2. Level of ordinary skill (Graham factor 2)

A PHOSITA here is an engineer (B.S. in EE, ME, chemE, physics, or materials science, or equivalent experience) with ~2–5 years in semiconductor process-tool design or fab metrology, or alternatively ~3–5 years in instrumentation/gas-sensing. Critically, the PHOSITA is presumed familiar with (a) wafer-compatible "sensor wafer" metrology consumables, (b) the standard cluster-tool architecture (FOUP/SSP → factory interface → load lock → transfer chamber → process chamber) and its robots, and (c) standard sorbent-tube air-sampling chemistry (NIOSH-style tubes, thermal desorption, GC/MS).

3. Prior art relied on

4. Ground A — Claims 1–11 and 16–20: DE 103 141 50 A1 in view of the CyberOptics wafer-like/substrate-like sensor art

Claim 1. DE 103 141 50 discloses every functional element:

• disc body / bottom disc + top cover with sidewall: DE 103 141 50 discloses a wafer-dimensioned carrier substrate; CyberOptics US 2020/0152494 discloses a two-layer (bottom + annular top) disc with a recessed pocket and a seated electronics housing — the claimed "bottom disc + top cover with sidewall attached to the bottom disc" is the natural mechanical realization of a sealed wafer-form package.
• sensor exposed via a first aperture: US 2005/0224899 teaches a substrate-like tool sensor whose housing is sealed except for a vent allowing gas to pass to the sensing electronics. An aperture in the top cover for a gas sensor is also a functional necessity — a gas sensor with no fluid communication to the ambient cannot work — and DE 103 141 50's sensors are expressly exposed to the cassette/chamber atmosphere.
• gas contaminant detection + detection signal: DE 103 141 50 (gas sensors; AMC at ppm/ppb).
• microcontroller generating measurement data from the detection signal: DE 103 141 50's conditioning unit + control unit converting measurement signals into measurement data. Naming the control element a "microcontroller" is a difference in nomenclature, not substance.
• wireless communication circuit → WAP: DE 103 141 50's interface unit preferably wirelessly transmits measurement data to an evaluation device; US 2020/0152494 and US 9,356,822 add Wi-Fi/Bluetooth to a remote server. Choosing a wireless access point as the receiver is one of a small, predictable set of fab networking options (WAP vs. BLE vs. proprietary RF) — KSR predictable variation.

Claim 11 (6–9 mm thick; 190–320 mm diameter). DE 103 141 50 expressly sizes the carrier to process-wafer diameters (200 mm, 300 mm — both squarely inside 190–320 mm) and to a thickness matched to process wafers so it "is not distinguishable" from a wafer and passes through the tool's slits and end effectors. The claim's thickness/diameter range is a result-effective variable (must fit slit valves and end effectors) whose limits the specification does not show to be critical.

Claims 2, 4, 8, 10 map almost directly:

• Cl. 2 (ppm AMC/VOC): DE 103 141 50 states ppm/ppb AMC relevance; US 7,790,479 adds ppb-level FOUP AMC.
• Cl. 4 (PCB; bottom disc = substrate; sidewall encloses PCB; opening for connector interfaces): US 2020/0152494 (circuit board inside a housing in a pocket) + US 9,356,822 (charging contact / data exchange through the pod structure). Providing a sidewall cut-out for a USB port, toggle switch, or memory card is routine mechanical accommodation of a connector.
• Cl. 8 (set of four apertures/sensors): DE 103 141 50 expressly discloses a plurality of differing gas sensors at different positions on the sensor wafer to resolve spatial gradients — this is a direct teaching, not an obviousness leap.
• Cl. 10 (memory card, battery, booster converter): DE 103 141 50 (data-storage unit, removable data storage, battery/accumulator/capacitor, rechargeable via field); US 9,356,822 (battery, battery-management controller, charging contact). A boost/charge converter with status LEDs is conventional power-management circuitry universally used where a 3.7 V Li-ion cell must feed 5 V logic — predictable result, no unexpected function.

Claims 6–7, 9 (aperture/fan/PCB third aperture). This is the ground's weakest structural link, but still strong: moving the sampled gas across the sensing element faster is the classic and well-known way to cut a gas sensor's response time, and volume/pressure-driven sampling appears throughout the sampler art (US 6,477,906, US 6,321,609, US 11,154,794 — all pump air past/through a sorbent bed or trap). The patent's own stated reason ("to increase air flow and thus sensitivity") is exactly the predictable result a PHOSITA would expect. The layering (fan on the PCB between a top-cover aperture and a PCB aperture to define a through-flow path) is ordinary packaging design once the fan is chosen. Note the specification itself discloses the alternative of a MEMS pump for the same air-moving function, confirming the choice of air mover is a design variable, not an invention.

Claim 5 (SPI or I²C between sensor and PCB). I have no verified reference disclosing I²C/SPI for this specific sensor-to-host link. This limitation nonetheless falls to KSR's "known technique" prong: I²C and SPI are the default embedded buses for connecting sensor ICs to a microcontroller, and US 10,008,373 B1 shows multi-element sensor arrays on a printed circuit board with wireless readout. This is the ground's most clearly "common sense" element.

Claims 16–20 (method). DE 103 141 50 teaches the method in substance: place the sensor wafer in a transport cassette in place of a process wafer; run it through the manufacturing stations like a process wafer; determine contamination station by station; determine chamber constituents by moving it into the process chamber; and wirelessly transmit the data. US 9,356,822 teaches the sensor-wafer-in-FOUP handling and docking; US 11,194,259 teaches the EFEM/load-lock/transfer-chamber robot topology. Mapping the two robots onto a standard AMAT-style cluster tool (FI SCARA → load lock → transfer-chamber robot → process chamber) is dictated by the tool itself.

• Cl. 17 (location-by-location transmission): DE 103 141 50's real-time/alarm transmission during exposure, plus its per-station contamination localization, makes location-tagged transmission the natural implementation.
• Cl. 18 (return-trip measurement): inherent — a disc ferried in must be ferried out; collecting data on the outbound leg costs nothing structurally and is an obvious additional use of the same hardware.
• Cl. 19 (baseline calibration outside the FI): DE 103 141 50 teaches calibration by counter-measurement with the sensor wafer; US 7,790,479 teaches a calibration sequence (reference gas), a purge sequence, and measuring the surrounding atmosphere to quantify background noise. Fresh-air/zero baselining before deployment is standard gas-sensor field practice.
• Cl. 20 (condition → ADC → discrete ppm values): DE 103 141 50's conditioning unit; an ADC is a standard peripheral of the microcontroller of claim 1, and converting a conditioned analog signal to discrete concentration values is the stated purpose of the device.

Rationale to combine: Both reference families attack the same problem — obtaining in-situ measurements inside closed minienvironments, load locks, and process chambers without installing and wiring sensors in each chamber (DE 103 141 50 states that permanently installing/wiring gas-tight sensors in each minienvironment is costly and often impractical), and without taking the tool offline. Both rely on the same solution architecture: a wafer-compatible wireless carrier. Substituting a gas sensor for the particle/humidity/positional sensor of the commercial wafer-like sensors, or adding an apertured top cover to the sensor-wafer of DE 103 141 50, is a combination of known elements each performing its known function, with a predictable result and a strong articulated motivation.

5. Ground B — Claims 12–15: sorbent-tube sampler art in view of the wafer-form carrier art

Claim 12 elements and mapping:

• substrate disc + sorbent tube attached (one end capped, one open): US 4,584,887 (circular frame carrying multiple sorbent tubes about its periphery), US 6,321,609/US 6,477,906 (sorbent tubes in a magazine), US 2009/0011519 (capped micro cartridge; airtight transport housing).
• MEMS pump with air tube forcing ambient air into the tube: US 11,154,794 (pump fluidically coupled to a trap to draw an air sample onto the sorbent), US 11,029,295 (micro-pump + sorbing liner for VOC sampling), US 6,477,906 (pump + tubes), US 2006/0102844 (pump drawing sample into removable cartridge).
• automatic shut-off after a calibrated time period after activation: US 11,154,794 — controller discontinues pumping after a determined volume is drawn ("auto shut-off" is claimed in the alternative in the specification itself: "a sensor may detect a volume of gas pumped into a sorbent tube, and the MEMS pump may be shut off responsive to the volume of gas meeting a threshold"). A calibrated-time shut-off versus a calibrated-volume shut-off is a predictable variation of the same control concept, and both land on the same physical result (known sample mass collected).
• microcontroller to activate the pump: US 6,477,906 (processor-controlled automated sampling), US 11,154,794 (controller coupled to pump).
• wafer form factor / fab transportability: DE 103 141 50 + US 9,356,822.

Claim 13: thickness range — same reasoning as claim 11. Clamp attachment — the specification itself lists glue, bonding agent, clip, and magnet as interchangeable alternatives, which is an admission that the fastening means is an arbitrary design choice.

Claim 14: PCB + pump + microcontroller on a central portion — DE 103 141 50 places its conditioning/storage/control electronics centrally on the wafer carrier. Second sorbent tube + second MEMS pump + microcontroller activating both — US 4,584,887 discloses plural tubes on a carousel indexed by a selector valve; replacing one pump + selector valve with one pump per tube is a plainly equivalent, predictable alternative (and is motivated by the very reason the specification gives: isolating the air of distinct tool locations). US 6,477,906's AMTAS collects a predetermined number of separate archive samples at scheduled times — the same partitioning concept.

Claim 15 (ambient air of storage location / FI / load lock / transfer chamber / process chamber): DE 103 141 50 expressly names the transport cassette, the clean room, the sluice (load-lock) chambers, and the process chamber, and US 9,356,822 puts a sensor wafer inside a FOUP.

Rationale to combine: The problem is identical to Ground A — you cannot get a technician's bench sampler into a sealed FOUP I/O port, a load lock, or a process chamber, and manual sampling with a backpack pump is slow and unrepresentative. The wafer-form wireless carrier is the known vehicle for in-situ measurement in exactly those locations (DE 103 141 50; US 9,356,822). Mounting known sorbent tubes and a known micro-pump onto that known carrier yields only the predictable aggregation of the known functions: timed active sampling at a known location, then laboratory GC analysis for greater accuracy (the specification concedes this trade-off as an expected benefit: "use of sorbent tubes and gas chromatography can yield more accurate results"). That is textbook KSR combination.

6. Weak points / where validity would be fought

I want to be explicit about where I have lower confidence, rather than presenting a uniformly strong picture:

1. Claim 3 (t50 ≤ 10 s; t90 ≤ 30 s). This is the one numeric limitation for which I could not verify a prior-art reference disclosing those specific figures. The examiner-cited gas-sensor art (US 4,457,161, US 5,675,070, US 8,683,847, etc.) plausibly addresses solid-state gas-sensor kinetics as a genus, but I have not confirmed individual disclosures and will not assert them. The strong obviousness argument is instead: the specification asserts no criticality and shows no unexpected result for 10 s/30 s; response time is a result-effective variable routinely specified on commercial micro solid-state/amperometric gas-sensor datasheets; and DE 103 141 50's control/alarm function (warning on limit breach) creates a design incentive to select fast-responding sensors. A patentee defending claim 3 would argue the specific values were a non-obvious selection; a challenger would argue the specification provides no evidence of criticality.
2. Claim 5 (I²C/SPI). No verified reference; sustained on "known technique" (KSR prong 4) alone.
3. Claim 6–7 (in-disc axial fan / PCB through-aperture). No single reference I verified shows a fan inside a wafer-form sensor. The ground relies on the explicit, self-evidenced purpose (increase airflow and sensitivity) plus the sampler-art pumps. A challenger should be prepared with art on fan-assisted gas sensors or on the CyberOptics APS airflow design.
4. US 2020/0152494 A1 as art is razor-thin — published 2020-05-14, i.e., 26 days before the 2020-06-09 filing. It is valid § 102(a)(1) art only if the 2020-06-09 date is truly the effective filing date (it is: no provisional, no foreign priority in the US chain — the WO/TW/JP/KR/CN filings all claim from it). Any priority claim it might have inherited would have to be to an earlier application, which would strengthen its date, not weaken it. So the exposure is a date-authentication issue, not a substantive one.
5. Common-ownership risk for Applied Materials art. Several potentially useful references in this space (e.g., US 2019/0286075 A1; US 2020/0298368 A1; US 2020/0331113 A1) are Applied Materials documents. To the extent any such reference pre-dates the 2020-06-09 filing and is relied on under § 102(a)(2), § 102(b)(2)(C) / former § 103(c) common ownership could disqualify it. I could not verify ownership and inventorship overlap, so treat this as a flag for diligence rather than a conclusion. The references I actually rely on above (DE 103 141 50, the CyberOptics family, US 9,356,822, US 7,790,479, and the sorbent-sampler family) are third-party art and are not affected.
6. Prior-art date verification not yet completed: US 11,029,295 (Voctron) and US 11,154,794 (Porter) are relied on for their pre-grant application publication dates; I confirmed their priority dates (2018-10-11 and 2016-10-10) and grant dates but not the pre-grant publication numbers/dates. Both should be within the window before 2020-06-09, but I have not independently verified the publication certificates, and I flag that as an open item.
7. No secondary considerations of record. I found no evidence of unexpected results, licensing, copying, industry praise, or long-felt-but-unmet need tied to the claims. The advantages the patent asserts (yield improvement, lower cost of ownership, no need to shut down processing) are the expected consequences of successful contamination localization, not evidence of non-obviousness. The broad international family (WO2021252463A1; TW I826793B/I887861B; JP7398013B2/JP7704822B2; KR102540950B1; CN115667919B) evidences commercial interest but is not itself a cognizable secondary consideration.
8. A note on the truncated "Cited By" entry. WO2024254097A1 (2023-0…) is a third party citing this patent, i.e., post-dating art showing the field building on the disclosure. It is irrelevant to § 103 here, but its existence is a reminder that the disclosure is being treated as background by later filers — which cuts against non-obviousness of the architecture over time.

7. Bottom line

Under Graham/KSR, claims 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 look strongly obvious (a two-reference combination is enough: DE 103 141 50 A1 + CyberOptics US 2005/0224899 A1 / US 2020/0152494 A1 for the disc claims; DE 103 141 50 A1 + US 9,356,822 (and US 11,194,259 for the tool topology) for the method claims). Claims 12, 13, 14 look strongly obvious over the sorbent-sampler art (US 6,477,906 / US 6,321,609 / US 4,584,887 + US 11,154,794 + US 2009/0011519) combined with the wafer-form carrier art. The best candidates for surviving a validity challenge are claim 3's response-time numbers, and secondarily the in-disc fan/aperture topology of claims 6–7 and 9 and the I²C/SPI limitation of claim 5 — and even those are vulnerable on result-effective-variable and known-technique grounds absent evidence of criticality that I did not find in the specification.