ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,705,730, issued on Aug. 11, was assigned to ASML Netherlands B.V. (Veldhoven, Netherlands).
"Charged particle image inspection" was invented by Hairong Lei (San Jose, Calif.), Wei Fang (Milpitas, Calif.) and Yung Wen Fu (Hsinchu County, Taiwan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An unknown defect type cannot be identified or classified by existing defect classification techniques. An improved defect classification method includes obtaining an inspection image of a wafer resulting from a lithography process, obtaining layout data associated with the inspection image, obtaining a probability map derived from the layout data, wherein the probabi...