US 6610601

I'll search for authoritative information on US patent 6610601.

US Patent 6,610,601 — Search Results

Sources consulted: Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US6610601](/patent/US6610601)/en), FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/6610601.html), Justia (https://patents.justia.com/patent/6610601). A targeted search of CAFC 2026 dockets for "6610601" returned no results — see the caveat at the end.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (as issued)

"A method is described comprising removing an oxide from a surface and then commencing application of a passivation layer to the surface within 5 seconds of the oxide removal. The surface may be a copper surface which may further comprise a bonding pad surface. Removing the oxide may further comprise applying a solution comprising citric acid or hydrochloric acid. Applying the passivation layer may further comprise applying a solution comprising a member of the azole family where the azole family member may further comprise BTA. The method may also further comprise completely applying the passivation layer 35 seconds after commencing its application."

Note the mismatch worth flagging: the abstract describes a method, but the 15 issued claims are all product (bond-pad structure) claims. This is because US 6,610,601 is a continuation that claims the apparatus/structure, while the method appears to have been pursued in the parent US 6,358,847 B1.

Independent claims in plain language

Claim 1 — Bond pad with passivation layer and punched-through wire bond
A semiconductor bond pad comprising three elements: (a) a metal bond pad layer (copper, per claim 2); (b) a passivation layer formed over that bond pad layer, sized/configured to cover the pad and prevent native oxide formation; and (c) a wire bond that is bonded through the passivation layer down to the metal bond pad layer — the wire bond being a "substantially uniform structure."

Claim 5 — Copper bond pad substantially free of native copper oxide
A copper bonding pad formed on a semiconductor device, comprising: (a) a copper layer that is substantially free of native copper oxide; (b) a passivation film disposed over the copper layer, the film also being substantially free of native copper oxide; and (c) a wire bond in contact with the copper layer, with the passivation film surrounding the wire bond.

Claim 10 — Bond pad with passivation layer contiguously defined around the wire bond
A bond pad comprising: (a) a semiconductor chip; (b) a copper layer defining a bond pad for receiving a wire bond; and (c) a passivation layer disposed directly over the copper layer, the copper layer being substantially free of native copper oxide; wherein the wire bond is in direct contact with the copper layer and the passivation layer is contiguously defined around the wire bond.

Dependent claims add: copper as the pad metal (claim 2); passivation defined from a member of the azole family (claims 3, 8, 13); passivation specifically BTA (claims 4, 9, 14); thickness/density configured to block oxygen-ambient interaction (claims 6, 11); film configured to allow the wire to pass through and bond (claims 7, 12); and wire of gold or aluminum (claim 15).

Plain-language overview of the invention

The patent addresses a copper-metallization manufacturing problem: exposed copper bond pads grow native oxide rapidly (the specification cites ~20 Å in the first minute in free air, ~50 Å in water), and that oxide prevents reliable wire bonding. The claimed solution is a structural one — a thin, dense passivation layer (e.g., benzotriazole/BTA, an azole) is formed over the copper pad shortly (within ~5 seconds) after the oxide is removed, protecting the pad during downstream transport, testing, dicing and thermal curing. Critically, the passivation layer is thin and porous-resistant enough to block oxygen, yet thin enough that the wire bond punches through it and makes direct contact with the copper. This distinguishes it from conventional adhesion/barrier layers (e.g., Ni/Au or Ni/Pd), where the metal layer is intentionally kept between the copper and the wire and must carry current. Here, current can flow directly between the wire bond and the copper pad.

Certainty / caveats

1. CAFC 2026 dockets: My search returned no results tying patent 6,610,601 to any CAFC 2026 docket. I cannot confirm from this search that the patent is or is not in 2026 Federal Circuit litigation. Given the patent expired in 2019 (anticipated expiration 2019-03-31), active 2026 appellate litigation appears unlikely, but I do not have authoritative confirmation — please consult PACER/CAFC docket databases directly.
2. Assignee: Google Patents lists Lam Research Corp as both current and original assignee, but notes its assignee data is not a legal determination. The Ontrak Systems references in the specification and cited art are predecessor/related entities, not necessarily the recorded assignee.
3. Patent number interpretation: Per your instruction, I treated "6610601" literally as US 6,610,601 B2 and did not substitute similar numbers (e.g., I did not return US 6,358,847 B1, the parent, except as context).
4. All claim text and bibliographic data above are drawn from the patent record itself and the sources cited; nothing here should be read as a legal conclusion on validity, enforceability, or claim scope.

I'll search for litigation records specifically involving US patent 6610601.

Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Let me check a few more specialized litigation sources.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 6,610,601

Patent identified: U.S. Patent No. 6,610,601 B2 ("Bond pad and wire bond"), assigned to Lam Research Corp., application 10/038,980 (filed 2002-01-04), a continuation of Ser. No. 09/282,596 (filed 1999-03-31, which issued as U.S. 6,358,847 B1). Priority date: 1999-03-31. Legal status per Google Patents: Expired – Lifetime (anticipated expiration 2019-03-31; maintenance fees paid 2007, 2011, 2015, with no later fee payment recorded).

Finding: No litigation located

I found no record of any litigation (district court, CAFC, ITC, or foreign) in which U.S. Patent No. 6,610,601 was asserted as an infringed patent, challenged in a declaratory judgment action, or otherwise placed at issue.

Targeted queries for the exact number returned no case records:

• Search for "6610601" litigation → zero results.
• Search of Unified Patents-style litigation queries → zero results.
• Searches for "6,610,601" / "Patent No. 6,610,601" in complaint/docket contexts returned no matching case.

Important negative-control note (number collisions)

Searches on the bare string "6610601" surfaced several unrelated hits, which I am explicitly excluding because they are not the U.S. patent:

• A Brazilian state-court publication (TJTO) referencing docket/notice no. 6610601 and a "Pregão Eletrônico 46/2025" procurement notice.
• An SEC EDGAR "关联标识" (association ID) 6610601 tied to Elan Corporation, Plc.
• JP6610601B2, a Japanese patent directed to a "Vehicle identification device" — a different jurisdiction and unrelated subject matter.

These illustrate why a bare-string search is unreliable; none concerns the Lam Research bond-pad patent.

Lam Research litigation located — but NOT involving the '601 patent

For completeness, the searches surfaced Lam Research disputes, none of which concern the '601 patent:

• Inpria Corp. v. Lam Research Corp., D. Del. Case No. 1:22-cv-01359-CJB (filed 2022) — EUV dry-resist patents (e.g., U.S. 10,732,505; 11,537,048). The '601 patent is not among the asserted patents or the DJ counterclaims. (Lam counterclaimed for declaratory judgment of non-infringement of the Inpria patents.)
• Tegal Corp. v. Lam Research Corp., N.D. Cal. — plasma reactor patents; Lam won summary judgment of non-infringement (Lam press release, Jan. 16, 2003). Patents at issue were Tegal's, not the '601.
• Lam Research v. Kirim Semitec Co., Ltd., Seoul District Court (Korea), preliminary injunction (Nov. 2002) — asserted U.S. 6,073,577 / Korean Patent No. 329974 on electrodes. Not the '601.

Confidence and limitations

• This is a negative finding, not a positive certification. My searches were web/aggregator-based (Google Patents, FREEPATENTSONLINE, RPX Insight, courtlistener/courtlistener recaps, Lam newsroom). I was unable to query PACER directly, Docket Navigator, or the Unified Patents litigation portal before exhausting my search budget, so I cannot rule out sealed, unindexed, or very old paper-era filings.
• The patent's assignment history to Lam Research makes it a candidate for defensive use, and its subject matter (copper bond-pad passivation/wire bonding) is a crowded art area. Nonetheless, no assertion involving this specific number was found.
• Consistent with the strict rule, I have not auto-corrected or conflated any identifiers; where the string "6610601" matched non-U.S.-patent records, I flagged them as unrelated rather than treating them as the patent.

Bottom line: Based on available sources as of this search, there is no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 6,610,601. If a definitive determination is required (e.g., for a freedom-to-operate or validity opinion), I recommend a paid Docket Navigator / Lex Machina / PACER party-name search for "Lam Research Corp." combined with the patent number, and a check of the related family member U.S. 6,358,847.

I'll verify the "no PTAB activity" default against public sources before writing up.

The first-pass results show Lam Research PTAB activity but for a different patent (RE40,264, the Flamm patent). Note the "6610601" hit is an SEC accession number for Elan Corporation — a false positive. Let me dig further.

Proceedings overview

Count: zero (0) AIA trial proceedings on file for US 6,610,601. The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings associated with this patent as of the most recent ingest, and my independent web checks surfaced nothing to contradict that — the only apparent "6610601" hits in search were false positives (an SEC accession number for Elan Corporation, and the unrelated IBM patent 5,961,601 in Expedia v. IBM, IPR2018-01354). Defense posture: there is no PTAB record to lean on — neither a petition win nor a cancellation that helps you. The absence is itself the signal, and it cuts against the "patent is hardened" and the "patent is already dead" narratives alike. See the caveats below before you build a defense theory on this.

No proceedings to itemize

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} entry to report, because the structured PTAB data set is empty for this patent and no public record of an AIA trial on US 6,610,601 was found. Per your constraints, I will not invent a proceeding number, petitioner, panel, or FWD. Anything below is context, not a proceeding report.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Because no IPR/PGR/CBM has ever been instituted against US 6,610,601, no claim has been canceled and no claim has been sustained through an AIA trial. All 15 issued claims — independent claims 1, 5, and 10, and dependents 2–4, 6–9, 11–15 — are in their as-issued form. There is no claim-level trial record to quote, so any statement about which claims "survived" would be fabricated; the correct framing is "untested at the PTAB." (Note the deliberate contrast with your premise options: this is neither "survived two IPRs and is hardened" nor "claims 1–5 have been canceled." It is untested.)

Estoppel landscape. With no petitioner, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel running against anyone on this patent. That means a defendant being asserted against today has the full prior-art universe available — including art that a hypothetical prior petitioner would have been barred from re-raising. The cited-art list from the face of the patent (§ 102/§ 103 candidates a petitioner would likely start from) includes: JP S53-1654 (Furukawa, preventing oxidation of copper members); WO 93/10277 (Electrochemicals, bonding copper to polymeric material); WO 94/27314 (IMEC, HF/carboxylic acid mixtures); US 5,818,109 and US 5,868,863 (Ontrak/Lam brush-scrubber cleaning); US 5,709,755 (TSMC CMP cleaning); and the non-patent literature, notably Yiqi Feng et al., "Corrosion protection of copper by a self-assembled monolayer of alkanethiol," J. Electrochem. Soc. 144(1):55–64 (1997) and an IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin (Nov. 1981, p. 2989) on protecting an M1 Cu surface prior to M2 evaporation. The Feng NPL and the IBM TDB are worth a hard look for a § 103 theory premised on self-assembled-monolayer copper passivation preceding a subsequent bonding step. None of this has been tested.

Pattern signals. No serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) in any chain for this patent, no PTAB-to-CAFC appeal trail, and no reissue. The parent, US 6,358,847 B1 ("Method for enabling conventional wire bonding to copper-based bond pad features"), carries the method claims while 6,610,601 carries the product claims — but the structured block covers only 6,610,601, so do not assume the absence of proceedings extends to the parent; check US 6,358,847 separately. The family also has a foreign counterpart set (WO 2000059029 A2, EP 1186022 A2, JP 2002-540631 A, KR 100731850/100731851 B1, TW 454281 B), all now lapsed or expired.

Recommended next steps

• Treat this as "no PTAB activity," plainly stated. Do not represent to a court or client that claims were invalidated or sustained. The only accurate statement is that no AIA trial has touched this patent.
• The patent is expired. Anticipated expiration was 2019-03-31, and it is recorded as Expired – Lifetime with the last maintenance fee (12-year) paid 2015-02-26. Verify whether any § 154(b) patent term adjustment pulls expiration past 2019-03-31 before relying on the date, but a demand letter on an expired patent raises immediate damages-cutoff and standing questions worth testing. See the Google Patents legal-status and events record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6610601/en
• If you are a defendant and want to verify the null result yourself, run the primary sources directly:
  • PTAB Trial Statistics / E2E: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ (search by patent number 6610601)
  • USPTO Patent Center: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ (Application 10/038,980)
  • CAFC docket / CourtListener: https://www.courtlistener.com/ (search "6,610,601")
• If no PTAB petition exists and you are contemplating one: note two threshold issues before drafting. First, expiration (anticipated 2019-03-31) may moot the practical value of an IPR. Second, confirm the parent US 6,358,847 status separately — an absence of proceedings on the child says nothing about the parent.

Caveats

1. Source of the null result. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block is the canonical list per your instructions, and it is empty. I corroborated via web search, which surfaced no AIA trial on US 6,610,601. I cannot, however, rule out a very recently filed petition not yet ingested by ODP; confirm against PTAB E2E as of today's date (2026-10-01).
2. False positives to avoid. Search results containing "6610601" that are not this patent include: a 2006-12-11 SEC filing accession for Elan Corporation plc (CIK 737572), and US 5,961,601 (IBM), which is the patent at issue in Expedia, Inc. v. IBM Corp., IPR2018-01354 — a genuinely different patent and a genuinely different proceeding. Do not conflate either with US 6,610,601.
3. No fabrication. No proceeding number, panel, FWD, settlement, or appeal is reported here because none was found. If a colleague's memo cites an IPR or CAFC number for this patent, treat it as unverified until you pull the document from PTAB E2E or CourtListener.
4. Sanity check on the absence. This is a Lam Research (process-equipment maker) patents-on-processing-methods family from 1999, expired in 2019, never a classic NPE assertion vehicle. That profile is consistent with zero IPRs — but "consistent with" is not "confirms," so verify independently.

I'll research the assignment record for US 6,610,601 before drafting.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 6,610,601 B2

Tooling limitation (stated up front, per your "don't fabricate" constraint): I was unable to pull the live USPTO Assignment Center record in this session. The searches I ran did not return any reel/frame entry, correspondent, or recorded conveyance for US 6,610,601. I therefore report no confirmed assignment records below, and I explicitly decline to invent reel/frame numbers, correspondent names, or execution dates. What I can ground is (a) the owner identity, (b) the corporate history of that owner, and (c) the absence of assignment events in the patent's own legal-events listing.

Inventors

Pattern note — and an important refinement to the prior section. The earlier section flagged Ontrak Systems as a "predecessor/related entity, not necessarily the recorded assignee." That is too soft. The evidence shows OnTrak was already a wholly-owned Lam subsidiary (acquired 1997; see https://sst.semiconductor-digest.com/1997/05/lam-to-acquire-cmp-supplier-ontrak/ and Lam's S-4 at https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?...CK=[707549](/patent/707549)), and at least one named inventor was an OnTrak employee at the relevant time. That makes the OnTrak→Lam relationship an intra-corporate consolidation, not an arm's-length transfer. By November 1999 EE Times reported Lam had "merged the unit into its own CMP tool group" (https://www.eetimes.com/gasonics-hires-ontrak-co-founder-to-expand-integrated-clean-business/).

No evidence of all inventors departing the assignee within 12 months of filing. Hymes remained publicly identified with the OnTrak/Lam clean business at least through mid-1998, i.e. past the March 1999 priority filing is plausible but not confirmed.

Original assignee

Lam Research Corporation (Fremont, CA) — named as original and current assignee on the face of the patent, with Google Patents cautioning its assignee data "is not a legal determination."

• Primary line of business: semiconductor wafer-fabrication equipment (plasma etch, thin-film deposition, photoresist strip, single-wafer wet clean). Publicly traded as Nasdaq: LRCX; a going concern with ~$14B+ revenue scale in recent years.
• Products embodying the field of the claims: Lam does ship commercial product in this exact technology lane. Its DV-Prime / Da Vinci / SP Series single-wafer spin-wet-clean systems trace directly to the OnTrak brush-scrub lineage, and its SABRE ECD family is the market-leading copper electrofill platform (per Lam's FY2014 Form 10-K, https://stocklight.com/stocks/us/nasdaq-lrcx/lam-research/annual-reports/nasdaq-lrcx-2014-10K-141065805.pdf). Whether any current shipping tool practices claims 1/5/10 is not something I can verify from public filings; the claims are structural (bond pad + passivation + punched-through wire bond) and read on a chip/package structure, not on a tool.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no acquisition of Lam itself. (Lam acquired Novellus in 2012; that is inbound, not outbound.)

Assignment timeline

No recorded post-issuance assignment was located. Two independent indications support this:

1. Google Patents legal-events tab for US 6,610,601 (in the authoritative record supplied to me) lists only:

   • 2003-08-07 STCF — Patent grant (patented case)
   • 2007-02-26 FPAY — Fee payment, year 4
   • 2011-02-28 FPAY — Fee payment, year 8
   • 2015-02-26 FPAY — Fee payment, year 12

   There is no AS (assignment) event in that list. Google Patents surfaces recorded assignments in this feed, so their absence is affirmative evidence of no change of owner after issue.

2. Country Status in the same record shows a single US family with the two applications (parent 09/282,596 → US 6,358,847 B1; continuation 10/038,980 → US 6,610,601 B2), and no third-party US holder.

The practical read: Lam Research Corporation remains the owner of record, and the patent expired 2019-03-31 (fee payment window closed; status "Expired – Lifetime") without ever being monetized through a recorded transfer.

If you need the definitive reel/frame (or a negative certification) for diligence, query https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ by patent number 6610601 and by application 10/038,980. I could not complete that query here.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 6610601
    1997 : OnTrak acquired by Lam Research
    1999 : Priority application filed
    2002 : Continuation application filed
    2003 : Patent issued to Lam Research
    2015 : Final maintenance fee paid
    2019 : Patent expired

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data (no records, only the original assignment).

Justification: The patent's own legal-events record (Google Patents, US 6,610,601) shows only the 2003-08-07 STCF grant event and three FPAY maintenance payments — no AS assignment event of any kind, and I could not retrieve a contrary reel/frame from the Assignment Center. Combined with an unbroken ownership record ending at Lam Research Corporation, a going-concern operating manufacturer (Nasdaq: LRCX), and with no infringement suit naming 6,610,601 located, there is no basis for an NPE finding. Note that "Insufficient data" here reflects a records-access limitation, not a suspicion: the affirmative evidence points to a clean, single-owner, operating-company patent that expired 2019-03-31. It is not classifiable as "Defensive / non-asserting" either, because no defensive aggregator ever acquired it.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 6610601 or application 10/038,980) · https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Corrections / flags carried forward

1. Prior section's Ontrak caveat is too weak — see Inventors above. OnTrak Systems was a wholly-owned Lam subsidiary at filing, which strengthens rather than weakens the "no third-party transfer" conclusion.
2. Assignee identity is not in dispute — nothing in my research contradicts the prior section's Lam Research finding.
3. No new litigation finding — consistent with the prior section's Caveat #1 (no CAFC 2026 docket tie; patent expired 2019-03-31).
4. All reel/frame, correspondent, and execution-date fields are intentionally blank because I could not verify them. Treat these as "to be confirmed at the Assignment Center," not as "none exist."

I'll search the USPTO and public patent databases for US 6,610,601 and its cited references.

Scope and method note

I attempted to pull US 6,610,601 (and each of its cited references) directly from USPTO/Google Patents. My live searches did not return a clean USPTO PatentCenter record for 6,610,601 within the search budget — the queries returned unrelated documents. I am therefore relying on the authoritative full text supplied in the prompt (Google Patents record, fetched 2026-09-24) for the claim set, the list of 27 patent citations, the 4 non-patent citations, and the "families citing / family cites" lists. Supplementary descriptions below were verified by search where results returned (e.g., US 4,370,173; US 4,871,422; the Electrochemicals/BTA family; the Kulicke & Soffa copper-bond-pad family).

I treated 6610601 literally as US 6,610,601 B2 and did not substitute similar numbers. The parent US 6,358,847 B1 (Ser. No. 09/282,596) is the same family and is not prior art to the '601 — it is a continuation parent. Its method claims (citric/HCl oxide removal, azole/BTA passivation, 5-second timing) are what the '601 abstract describes, but all 15 issued '601 claims are product/bond-pad structure claims. That mismatch drives the entire prior-art analysis below: most cited references are process/cleaning art that cannot read on a structural claim, and the truly dangerous art is the small set about (a) azole-on-copper protection and (b) a bondable layer that is punched through during wire bonding.

Part 1 — The 27 examiner-cited patent references

Legend for the §102 column: A = possible §102(a)/(b) printed publication (foreign/published); E = possible §102(e) (US patent as of its filing date); — = cannot anticipate any '601 claim standing alone (background/§103 only). Anticipation requires every element in one reference; almost none of these do that for the product claims, and I flag where that is the case.

Summary for the patent citations: Of the 27, only WO 93/10277 (Electrochemicals) is squarely on a claimed feature — the azole/BTA-on-copper limitation (claims 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14). The remainder are oxide-removal/cleaning/CMP/brush-scrubber art that map, at most, to the parent method (US 6,358,847), not to the issued structural claims. No single cited patent reference discloses all elements of claims 1, 5, or 10, because none shows a wire bond bonded through a thin passivation film into direct contact with a copper pad.

Part 2 — The four non-patent citations (NPL)

Part 3 — References of record in the family that are not on the '601 face (worth checking)

These appear in the "Family Cites Families" / "Families Citing this family" data and are not among the 27 face citations, but two are unusually on-point:

Part 4 — Bottom-line ranking and §102 conclusions

1. No cited reference anticipates claims 1–15. The claims require the combination of (i) a copper bond pad substantially free of native oxide, (ii) a thin/dense passivation film (azole/BTA per dependent claims) over it, and (iii) a wire bond bonded through the film into direct contact with the copper, with the film left surrounding/contiguously defined around the wire bond. The cited art is uniformly missing element (iii).
2. Closest §102 threats to the structural core (claims 1, 5, 10): US 6,413,576 B1 (frangible copper-bond-pad coating punched through by bonding — family-cited, earlier priority) and DE 4444388 A1 (wire bonding to oxidation-sensitive metal — family-cited). Both need full-text verification; they were not among the examiner's 27 citations.
3. Strongest face-cited art on specific limitations:
   • WO 93/10277 (Electrochemicals) → azole/BTA-on-copper limitations of claims 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14 (also §103 against the "prevent native oxide" element of 1/5/10).
   • IBM TDB "Protection of M1 Cu Surface…" (1981) → the oxidation-prevention function of claims 1, 5, 10.
   • Feng et al. (1997) → the "passivation film over copper" element of claims 5 and 10.
   • US 6,096,652 (Motorola) → copper-coordinating-ligand chemistry relevant to the azole genus of claims 3/8/13.
4. Everything else (refs #2–#4, #6, #8–#12, #14–#23, #25) is cleaning/etching/CMP/brush-scrubber/wafer-handling art that maps to the method of parent US 6,358,847 (oxide removal + BTA application within ~5 s), not to the issued product claims. Where the examiner likely used them, it was for the process context in the specification, not for claim rejection on the merits of claims 1–15.

Certainty / caveats

1. Verification depth. I fully confirmed the subject matter of US 4,370,173, US 4,871,422, WO 93/10277's BTA-azole content, and the Kulicke & Soffa copper-bond-pad family via search. Descriptions for the remaining references are drawn from their titles, the '601 specification's own characterization, and the record's dates; I did not individually open each one inside this session's search budget.
2. No live USPTO PatentCenter fetch. My search for "6610601" on USPTO did not return the specific record; I relied on the authoritative full text in the prompt. The dates and citation list are as recorded on the patent face.
3. §102 labels are analytic, not legal conclusions. Whether a reference is §102(a), (b), or (e) art depends on its actual publication/grant date relative to the 1999-03-31 priority and any earlier provisional/foreign priority; treat the A/E tags as starting points.
4. "Owner/complexity" caveat. Ontrak Systems references (#11–#14, #20) are the predecessor brushing-scrubber business associated with Lam Research (the '601 assignee); this is a commercial relationship, not a legal assignee determination.
5. Two date stamps differ between the system date (2026-10-01) and the task header (April 26, 2026); this does not affect the analysis, which turns on the 1999 priority date.

If you want, I can drill into any single reference (full claim 1 mapping, element-by-element) — I'd prioritize US 6,413,576 B1 and DE 4444388 A1, since those are the only references I found whose disclosed purpose matches the '601's punch-through-bond structural concept.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in the actual references of record. Let me verify the disclosure content of the most probative ones.

Let me verify a few more of the key references of record.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 6,610,601 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the summary and litigation sections above. No contradiction with those sections was found; one refinement to the prior-art posture is flagged in §5 below.

1. Threshold: what the claims actually require

Because § 103 analysis is claim-by-claim, the first observation is that none of the 15 issued product claims recites the "within 5 seconds" limitation that dominates the abstract, the summary, and the entire specification. The timing window lives only in the method disclosure (and in the parent, US 6,358,847 B1). The '601 claims are therefore pure structural/product claims covering any copper bond pad bearing a thin oxide-blocking layer with a wire punched through it — regardless of how or how fast the layer was formed. That materially enlarges the prior-art field.

Element breakdown of the three independent claims:

Dependent claims add only: copper pad metal (2); azole-family layer (3, 8, 13); BTA (4, 9, 14); thickness/density tuned to block oxygen ambients (6, 11); layer permeable to the bonding wire (7, 12); Au or Al wire (15).

Notably, the specification itself concedes the chemistry: azoles "are known to provide protection against the growth of native oxides on copper," BTA is "currently the most widely-used passivating agent for Copper," and is "the major component of many commercially available solutions… (such as StopOx™ from Applied Chemical Technologies, Inc.)." Those are applicant admissions of prior art, usable as § 103 evidence independent of any reference.

Person of ordinary skill: a packaging/wafer-fab process engineer (or materials engineer) with ~2–5 years in IC metallization/interconnect and wire bonding, familiar with (a) Cu native-oxide growth, (b) azole/BTA copper corrosion inhibitors used in PCB OSP and CMP chemistry, and (c) ball/wedge thermosonic bonding equipment.

2. The prior art of record, and its § 102 status

3. Combination 1 (broadest): DE 4444388 + JP S53-001654 + EP 0344504 + Feng et al.

Renders obvious claims 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15.

• DE 4444388 A1 supplies the core structure: a copper bond surface bearing an organic protective layer that prevents oxide formation, with a wire directly bonded to the copper through/at the layer — i.e., the layer covers the pad, the bond reaches metal-to-metal contact, and the layer is left contiguously disposed around the bond footprint. That is claims 1(a)–(c), 5(a)–(c), and 10(a)–(c) almost element-for-element, including the "substantially free of native copper oxide" state of the copper (the reference's stated purpose is preventing oxide layers and impurities on the copper surface).
• JP S53-001654 and EP 0344504 (IBM) supply the azole/benzotriazole species identification, and EP 0344504 explicitly frames the copper-benzotriazole layer as a "barrier to oxide formation" — the functional language of claims 1 and 6/11 — on an IC substrate. Provides claims 3, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14.
• Feng et al. (1997) supplies the "thin and dense" teaching: a self-assembled monolayer is the paradigm of a coating thick enough to block ambient oxygen yet thin enough to be transparent to a subsequent joining operation. Provides claims 6, 7, 11, 12.
• Claim 15 (Au or Al wire): DE 4444388 discloses ultrasound wire bonding (the Al-wire regime); K&S's data covers gold wire; both are ordinary wire-bond materials — no separate inventive weight.

Motivation: all four references are in the same field of endeavor (copper metallization for electronics) and address the identical, expressly-recognized problem — Cu surface oxide defeating reliable joining. DE 4444388 states its own motivation: the conventional Ni-then-Au plating stack exists only because copper oxidizes, and eliminating the organic oxide problem lets you bond directly to copper and drop the plating steps. That is precisely the motivation the '601 specification recites for its own alleged invention.

4. Combination 2 (the "thickness/density/frangibility" combination): DE 4444388 + US 6,413,576 + Feng et al. + US 6,096,652

Renders obvious all of claims 1–15 to the extent Combination 1 leaves anything.

Even if one accepts the patentee's implicit premise that a passivation layer must be distinguished from a removable OSP layer, US 6,413,576 B1 closes that gap: it expressly claims a coating on a copper bond pad that (i) protects the bond pad from atmospheric contamination, and (ii) is frangible such that ball or wedge wire bonding obtains metal-to-metal contact between the wire and the copper. That is the "punched-through / direct contact / surrounding" concept of claims 1, 5, 7, 10, 12 in explicit terms, and it recites the 10–1000 Å (pref. 25–500 Å) thickness range that brackets the specification's own 15–20 Å working examples and its ≤20 Å target. Combining that teaching with the azole chemistry of JP S53-001654 / EP 0344504 / US 6,096,652 (claim 5: benzotriazole) and the monolayer-thickness teaching of Feng et al. yields every limitation of claims 1–15.

Motivation: both K&S and Atotech share the same express objective — eliminate the Ni/Au plating stack and bond directly to copper while preventing oxidation. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), makes this a textbook case: a known problem, a finite number of identified, predictable solutions (azole/thiol organic films vs. thin frangible ceramic), and a "design incentive" supplied by the cost and process-disruption of the Ni/Pd/Au approach that the '601 specification itself criticizes. The only difference between the references and claims 3/4/8/9/13/14 is the choice of passivating chemistry — and selecting BTA from the finite, well-known list of Cu oxide inhibitors (BTA, indazole, benzimidazole, indole, methyl benzotriazole — the very list in the specification) is a routine, results-expected selection.

5. Combination 3 (alternate oxide-removal route): WO 94/27314 (IMEC) + Ontrak US 5,868,863 / WO 97/13590 + any azole reference

Relevant to the "substantially free of native copper oxide" limitation (claims 5, 10).

• WO 94/27314 discloses HF/carboxylic-acid mixtures for semiconductor processing — the citric-acid/HCl-family removal chemistries recited in the specification (citric 0.2%, HCl 0.1%, malic, malonic, plus NH₄OH buffering).
• US 5,868,863 and WO 97/13590 (Ontrak, the predecessor of the assignee, and expressly incorporated by reference in the specification) disclose delivering liquid chemistry through a rotating brush core and transporting a wafer between two brush stations in five seconds or less — supplying the entire apparatus and the 5-second timing limitation of the parent method, though not needed for the '601's product claims.
• Combining these two known techniques (known acid etch for Cu oxide; known brush-scrubber transport at ≤5 s) with any of the azole references produces a copper pad "substantially free of native copper oxide" bearing an azole film — claims 5 and 10 — and yields a predictable result with no unexpected property.

6. The single most important refinement to the prior-art posture

US 6,413,576 B1 is not automatically § 102/§ 103 prior art against the '601, and should not be treated as such without checking its provisional.

Its Google Patents record shows an application (Ser. No. 09/330,906) filed 1999-06-11 and a PCT (PCT/US1999/023069) filed 1999-10-05, both claiming a 1998-10-05 priority date. The '601's priority date is 1999-03-31. Therefore:

• As a § 102(e) reference, US 6,413,576 is prior art only if its relied-upon disclosure is supported by the 1998-10-05 priority document (for pre-AIA § 102(e), benefit to a provisional requires § 119(e) support for the subject matter relied on).
• Its presence in the "Families Citing this family" list on the '601 page is consistent with a filing date after the '601 family — i.e., it is a forward citation, not a citation of record in the '601's "Patent Citations (27)" or "Non-Patent Citations (4)" lists. The '601's own citation lists do not include it.

This is a correction of emphasis, not of fact, relative to the earlier sections: nothing contradicts them, but a careless analyst would over-credit K&S as prior art. Conversely, DE 4444388 A1 (1996-05-30), JP S53-001654 (1978), the IBM TDB (1981), EP 0344504, WO 93/10277, WO 94/27314, and Feng et al. (1997) are all unambiguous § 102(b) art — more than one year before the earliest possible priority date — and none of them is subject to a § 103(c) common-ownership safe harbor vis-à-vis Lam Research.

7. Claims that would be hardest for a challenger

1. Claim 1's "the wire bond being a substantially uniform structure." This is the least clear limitation in the patent. If it is construed to require something beyond an ordinary ball bond (e.g., absence of a separate stud bump, or homogeneous composition), the references would need to be shown to produce such a bond. In practice this limitation also invites a § 112(b) indefiniteness attack, which is often the more efficient invalidity theory than § 103 for such a term.
2. The BTA-specific claims (4, 9, 14) if the challenger relies only on generic "azole" disclosures. This is easily cured by adding EP 0344504 (IBM) (copper benzotriazole on an IC substrate as an oxide-formation barrier) and US 6,096,652 claim 5 (benzotriazole for Cu in semiconductor processing) — both of record.
3. A secondary-considerations defense. There is no evidence in the record of unexpected results, licensing, or copying; the earlier litigation section found no litigation involving the '601, so there is no developed record of objective indicia. The patent also expired 2019-03-31, which limits the practical incentive to mount (or defend) such a challenge but does not affect the § 103 analysis.

8. Bottom line

On the prior art of record, DE 4444388 A1 (Atotech) is the primary reference: it teaches an organic protective layer on copper surfaces to prevent native oxide formation and enable direct ultrasonic wire bonding to copper, expressly as a replacement for Ni/Au plating. Combined with (a) JP S53-001654 and EP 0344504 (IBM) for azole/benzotriazole as the copper-oxide barrier chemistry, (b) Feng et al. (1997) for ultra-thin, dense copper-protective films, (c) US 6,096,652 (Motorola) for benzotriazole in semiconductor Cu processing, and (d) WO 94/27314 (IMEC) and the Ontrak brush-scrubber references for oxide removal and the transport/application hardware, every limitation of claims 1–15 is disclosed or suggested, with a clear articulated motivation supplied both by the references themselves and by the '601 specification's own admissions about azole/BTA being known copper oxide inhibitors. A separate, independent § 103 path runs through US 6,413,576 (K&S) — which expressly claims a frangible 10–1000 Å coating on a copper bond pad penetrated during ball/wedge bonding — provided its 1998-10-05 priority is supported for the relied-upon disclosure.

Caveats: I have characterized DE 4444388 A1, JP S53-001654 A, and the 1981 IBM TDB from abstracts and secondary sources (EP 0794847 A1 abstract, Derwent AN 1978-14699A, and search snippets), not from full-text review. Before relying on any of this for a validity opinion, retrieve the full texts — particularly DE 4444388 A1, to confirm whether the organic layer is retained at/around the bond site after ultrasound bonding (which governs whether that reference anticipates claims 1, 5, and 10 outright under § 102(b) rather than merely rendering them obvious).