ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,439,642, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).
"Seam-top seal for dielectrics" was invented by Kuei-Lin Chan (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Fu-Ting Yen (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Yu-Yun Peng (Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Keng-Chu Lin (Ping-Tung, Taiwan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A post-deposition treatment can be applied to an atomic layer deposition (ALD)-deposited film to seal one or more seams at the surface. The seam-top treatment can physically merge the two sides of the seam, so that the surface behaves as a continuous material to allow etching at a substantially uniform rate across the surface of ...