Patent 7476289 was granted and assigned to Applied Materials on January, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present invention includes a method and apparatus for bonding a sputtering target to a backing plate. In one embodiment, a sputtering target is vacuum bonded to a backing plate using an elastomeric adhesive and a metal mesh. The vacuum pulls the backing plate and sputtering target together while also removing air pockets that inevitably form within the adhesive during adhesive deposition and backing plate attachment.