ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,333,701, issued on June 17, was assigned to KLA Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.).
"Fast and fuzzy pattern grouping" was invented by Kangjia Liao (Shanghai), Jing Jiao (Milpitas, Calif.), Changqing Hu (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Vikram Tolani (San Jose, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods and systems for determining information for a specimen are provided. One system includes a computer subsystem configured for removing one or more patterns in a specimen image that do not touch a defect detected in the specimen image thereby generating a modified specimen image. The computer subsystem is also configured for generating one or more hash codes...