US Patent Issued to International Business Machines on April 7 for "Automatic detection of mask defects in semiconductor processing" (New York Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,597,116, issued on April 7, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).

"Automatic detection of mask defects in semiconductor processing" was invented by Choong Ho Lee (Hopewell Junction, N.Y.) and Donguk Choi (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Detecting mask defects during semiconductor processing includes scanning, by one or more processors, a wafer during a lithography process of semiconductor processing. A first chip of a plurality of chips on the wafer is compared with a neighboring chip. In response to detecting a defect on the first chip during the comparison, a location of the defect on t...