ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,393,124, issued on Aug. 19, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"High throughput and high position accurate method for particle inspection of mask pods" was invented by Shih-Jui Huang (Hsinchu, Taiwan), ShinAn Ku (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Ting-Hao Hsu (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Hsin-Chang Lee (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of inspecting an outer surface of a mask pod includes moving a stage holding a mask pod such that the stage stops at each location of a plurality of locations under an outer surface of the mask pod for a predefined amount of time. At each location of the plur...