US Patent Issued to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on Aug. 5 for "Method of breaking through etch stop layer" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,381,081, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Method of breaking through etch stop layer" was invented by Yu-Shih Wang (Tainan, Taiwan), Hong-Jie Yang (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Chia-Ying Lee (New Taipei, Taiwan), Po-Nan Yeh (Hsinchu, Taiwan), U-Ting Chiu (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Chun-Neng Lin (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Ming-Hsi Yeh (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Kuo-Bin Huang (Jhubei, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A photo resist layer is used to protect a dielectric layer and conductive elements embedded in the dielectric layer when patterning an etch stop layer underlying the dielectric layer. The p...