US Patent Issued to Nearfield Instruments on Jan. 13 for "Method of monitoring at least one of an overlay or an alignment between layers of a semiconductor substrate, scanning probe microscopy system and computer program" (Dutch Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 13 -- United States Patent no. 12,523,676, issued on Jan. 13, was assigned to Nearfield Instruments B.V. (Rotterdam, Netherlands).

"Method of monitoring at least one of an overlay or an alignment between layers of a semiconductor substrate, scanning probe microscopy system and computer program" was invented by Paul Zabbal (Amsterdam), Chung Bin Chuang (Best, Netherlands) and Daniele Piras (Rotterdam, Netherlands).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present document relates to a method of monitoring an overlay or alignment between a first and second layer of a semiconductor using a scanning probe microscopy system. The method comprises scanning the substrate surface using a...