ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,327,342, issued on June 10, was assigned to FEI Co. (Hillsboro, Ore.).
"Automatic particle beam focusing" was invented by Yuchen Deng (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Erik Franken (Nuenen, Netherlands), Bart van Knippenberg (Helden, Netherlands) and Holger Kohr (Eindhoven, Netherlands).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Various approaches are provided for automatically focusing particle beams for SPA. In one example, a method includes determining a focus adjustment for a region of a sample to achieve a targeted defocus based on at least one defocus measurement from at least one neighboring region of the sample, and causing an acquisition of an image...