US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on July 15 for "Method of manufacturing semiconductor devices" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,362,180, issued on July 15, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Method of manufacturing semiconductor devices" was invented by Chin-Ta Chen (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Hua-Tai Lin (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Han-Wei Wu (Tainan, Taiwan) and Jiann-Yuan Huang (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In a method of forming a pattern, a first pattern is formed over an underlying layer, the first pattern including main patterns and a lateral protrusion having a thickness of less than 25% of a thickness of the main patterns, a hard mask layer is formed over the first pattern, a planarization operation is per...