US Patent Issued to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on May 20 for "Memory device having via landing protection" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,310,261, issued on May 20, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Memory device having via landing protection" was invented by Tsung-Hsueh Yang (Taichung, Taiwan), Shih-Chang Liu (Alian Township, Taiwan) and Yuan-Tai Tseng (Zhubei, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A memory cell with a hard mask and a sidewall spacer of different material is provided. The memory cell may be manufactured by a method comprising forming a multi-layer stack and patterning the same to form the hard mask layer, the top electrode layer and the switching dielectric layer to form a hard mask, a top electrode and a swit...