US Patent Issued to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING on June 16 for "Systems and methods for actinic mask inspection and review in vacuum" (Taiwanese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,656,677, issued on June 16, was assigned to TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING COMPANY LTD. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Systems and methods for actinic mask inspection and review in vacuum" was invented by Chien-Lin Chen (Tainan, Taiwan), Danping Peng (Fremont, Calif.), Chih-Chiang Tu (Tauyen, Taiwan), Chih-Wei Wen (Tainan, Taiwan) and Hsin-Fu Tseng (Zhubei, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In a mask review method, a vacuum is drawn in a vacuum chamber that contains an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) actinic mask review system including an EUV illuminator, a mask stage, a projection optics box, and an EUV imaging sensor. With the vacuum drawn, a ...