ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,282,318, issued on April 22, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Semiconductor wafer cooling" was invented by Yung-Yao Lee (Zhubei, Taiwan), Cheng-Kang Hu (Kaohsiung, Taiwan), Jui-Chun Peng (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Hsu-Shui Liu (Pingjhen, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A cooling controller receives, from one or more sensors, wafer information associated with a wafer. The cooling controller determines a pattern mask area for the wafer based on the wafer information. The cooling controller determines a cooling time for the wafer based on the pattern mask area. The cooling controller causes a c...