US Patent Issued to Applied Materials on Dec. 30 for "Template-based image processing for target segmentation and metrology" (Chinese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,511,862, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Template-based image processing for target segmentation and metrology" was invented by Xinhuo Xiao (Hangzhou, China), Stephanie W. Chen (Fremont, Calif.), Waheb Bishara (San Mateo, Calif.) and Bin Lin (Hangzhou, China).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "One or more images of a portion of a wafer with fabricated devices are acquired using an imaging tool. A pattern of repeating features in an input image of a wafer is identified using various methods, such as correlation and clustering of neighboring vectors. A template is generated based on the found pa...