ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 23 -- United States Patent no. 12,422,363, issued on Sept. 23, was assigned to KLA Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.).
"Scanning scatterometry overlay metrology" was invented by Amnon Manassen (Haifa, Israel), Andrew V. Hill (Berkeley, Calif.), Yuri Paskover (Milpitas, Calif.), Itay Gdor (Tel-Aviv, Israel), Yonatan Vaknin (Yoqneam Llit, Israel) and Yuval Lubashevsky (Haifa, Israel).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An overlay metrology system may include an illumination an illumination source to generate an illumination beam, one or more illumination optics to direct the illumination beam to an overlay target on a sample as the sample is scanned relative to the illumination beam alon...