ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,300,900, issued on May 13, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
"Ammonium fluoride pre-clean protection" was invented by Li-Wei Chu (New Taipei, Taiwan), Ying-Chi Su (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Yu-Kai Chen (Taipei, Taiwan), Wei-Yip Loh (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Hung-Hsu Chen (Tainan, Taiwan), Chih-Wei Chang (Hsin-Chu, Taiwan) and Ming-Hsing Tsai (Chu-Pei, Taiwan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An ammonium fluoride gas may be used to form a protection layer for one or more interlayer dielectric layers, one or more insulating caps, and/or one or more source/drain regions of a semiconductor device during a pre-clean...