US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on June 3 for "Acoustic measurement of fabrication equipment clearance" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 4 -- United States Patent no. 12,320,782, issued on June 3, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Acoustic measurement of fabrication equipment clearance" was invented by Jun-Hao Deng (Hsin-Chu, Taiwan), Kuan-Wen Lin (Taichung, Taiwan), Sheng-Chi Chin (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Yu-Ching Lee (Kaohsiung, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods and systems disclosed herein use acoustic energy to determine a gap between a wafer and an integrated circuit (IC) processing system and/or determine a thickness of a material layer of the wafer during IC processing implemented by the IC processing system. An exemplary method includes em...