US Patent Issued to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing on June 23 for "Method of forming a contact plug using an hourglass-shaped opening to prevent a bowing profile" (Taiwanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,666,637, issued on June 23, was assigned to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

"Method of forming a contact plug using an hourglass-shaped opening to prevent a bowing profile" was invented by Chun-Neng Lin (Hsinchu, Taiwan), Yu-Shih Wang (Tainan, Taiwan) and Chia-Ling Chung (Hsinchu, Taiwan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method of forming a semiconductor device includes: forming an opening in a dielectric layer to expose an underlying conductive feature; conformally forming a first protection layer and a second protection layer in the opening; performing an anisotropic etching to remove a first portion of th...