ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 23 -- United States Patent no. 12,369,406, issued on July 22, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Electrostatic discharge protection for integrated circuit during back end-of-line processing" was invented by Hsi-Yu Kuo (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Tsung-Yuan Chen (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Yu-Lin Chu (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Chih-Wei Hsu (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In an integrated circuit (IC) fabrication process, devices or sub-circuits are fabricated in respective first and second electrical isolation regions. A back-to-back (B2B) diodes sub-circuit is fabricated in a third electrical isolation region, which includes a fi...