US Patent Issued to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on Jan. 20 for "Barrier-free approach for forming contact plugs" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 20 -- United States Patent no. 12,532,721, issued on Jan. 20, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Barrier-free approach for forming contact plugs" was invented by Ching-Yi Chen (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Sheng-Hsuan Lin (Zhubei, Taiwan), Wei-Yip Loh (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Hung-Hsu Chen (Tainan, Taiwan) and Chih-Wei Chang (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes etching a dielectric layer of a substrate to form an opening in the dielectric layer, forming a metal layer extending into the opening, performing an anneal process, so that a bottom portion of the metal layer reacts with a semiconductor region underlying th...