US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on March 4 for "Self-aligned encapsulation hard mask to separate physically under-etched MTJ cells to reduce conductive re-deposition" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 5 -- United States Patent no. 12,245,516, issued on March 4, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Self-aligned encapsulation hard mask to separate physically under-etched MTJ cells to reduce conductive re-deposition" was invented by Yi Yang (Fremont, Calif.), Dongna Shen (San Jose, Calif.), Vignesh Sundar (Fremont, Calif.) and Yu-Jen Wang (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for etching a magnetic tunneling junction (MTJ) structure is described. A MTJ stack is deposited on a bottom electrode wherein the MTJ stack comprises at least a pinned layer, a barrier layer on the pinned layer, and a free layer on...