ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,444,628, issued on Oct. 14, was assigned to KLA Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.).
"Image modeling-assisted contour extraction" was invented by Stefan Eyring (Weilburg, Germany), Zhijin Chen (Milpitas, Calif.) and Frank Laske (Weilmunster, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A wafer metrology tool, such as a scanning electron microscope, can generate an image of a structure on a wafer. A simulated image of the structure also is determined from a design of the wafer. A contour of the structure in the image and a contour of the structure in the simulated image are determined. These contours are compared."
The patent was filed on June 24, 2022, ...