ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 29 -- United States Patent no. 12,211,692, issued on Jan. 28, was assigned to Tokyo Electron Ltd. (Tokyo).
"Wafer processing method" was invented by Noriaki Okabe (Tokyo), Takuya Seino (Tokyo), Ryota Kozuka (Tokyo), Yasuhiro Hamada (Yamanashi, Japan) and Yuutaro Kishi (Yamanashi, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of processing a wafer includes preparing a wafer having a substrate and a silicon-containing film formed on the substrate; forming a hard mask on the silicon-containing film; forming a pattern on the hard mask by etching the hard mask; and etching the silicon-containing film using the hard mask on which the pattern is formed, wherein the hard mask ha...