Patent 8940365 was granted and assigned to Tokyo Electron on January, 2015 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A device to form a coating film which can quickly coat a substrate of a follow-up lot after coating a preceding lot. The device is configured such that nozzles for a preceding lot and a following lot are integrated into a common movement mechanism and moved between an upper side of a liquid processing unit and a standby area. A coating method includes sucking air into the nozzle for the preceding lot to form an upper gas layer, sucking a solvent for the preceding lot in the standby area to form a thinner layer, and sucking air into the nozzle for the preceding lot to form a lower gas layer within the nozzle, and thus forming a state that a solvent layer is interposed between the upper gas layer and the lower gas layer.