ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,288,716, issued on April 29, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Phase control in contact formation" was invented by Chun-Hsien Huang (Hsinchu, Taiwan), I-Li Chen (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Pin-Wen Chen (Keelung, Taiwan), Yuan-Chen Hsu (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Wei-Jung Lin (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Chih-Wei Chang (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Ming-Hsing Tsai (Chu-Pei, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes forming a first metallic feature, forming a dielectric layer over the first metallic feature, etching the dielectric layer to form an opening, with a top surface of the first metallic feature being expose...