US Patent Issued to NIKON on March 24 for "Pattern exposure apparatus, device manufacturing method, and exposure apparatus" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,585,195, issued on March 24, was assigned to NIKON Corp. (Tokyo).

"Pattern exposure apparatus, device manufacturing method, and exposure apparatus" was invented by Masaki Kato (Yokohama, Japan), Yasushi Mizuno (Saitama, Japan), Toshiharu Nakashima (Fukaya, Japan) and Satoshi Kawado (Tokyo).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A pattern-exposure-apparatus includes: spatial-light-modulating-element including a plurality of micro-mirrors selectively driven based on drawing data, illumination-unit that irradiates spatial-light-modulating-element with illumination-light at predetermined-incidence-angle, and projection-unit that projects reflected-l...