ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,444,688, issued on Oct. 14, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
"Deep trench protection" was invented by Fu-Chiang Kuo (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Tao-Cheng Liu (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Shih-Chi Kuo (Taipei, Taiwan) and Tsung-Hsien Lee (Tainan, Taiwan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A semiconductor device includes: at least one conductive feature disposed on a substrate; at least one dielectric layer overlying the substrate, a trench structure extending through the at least one dielectric layer; and a protection layer overlaying the trench structure."
The patent was filed on June 15, 2022, under Application No...