US Patent Issued to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on Sept. 2 for "Geometric mask rule check with favorable and unfavorable zones" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,406,130, issued on Sept. 2, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Geometric mask rule check with favorable and unfavorable zones" was invented by Shih-Ming Chang (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Shinn-Sheng Yu (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Jue-Chin Yu (Taichung, Taiwan) and Ping-Chieh Wu (Zhubei, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes generating a diffraction map from a plurality of target patterns, generating a favorable zone and an unfavorable zone from the diffraction map, placing a plurality of sub-resolution patterns in the favorable zone, and performing a plurality of geometric operations on the pl...