US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on July 8 for "Methods of etching metals in semiconductor devices" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,354,881, issued on July 8, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING Co. LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Methods of etching metals in semiconductor devices" was invented by Wei-Hao Liao (Taichung, Taiwan), Hsi-Wen Tien (Hsinchu County, Taiwan), Chih Wei Lu (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Pin-Ren Dai (New Taipei, Taiwan) and Chung-Ju Lee (Hsinchu County, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A semiconductor structure includes a conductive feature disposed over a semiconductor substrate, a via disposed in a first interlayer dielectric (ILD) layer over the conductive feature, and a metal-containing etch-stop layer (ESL) disposed on the via, where the m...