Appeal No. 2001-0864
Application No. 08/841,214
BACKGROUND
Appellants’ invention relates to a surface inspection tool. An understanding of
the invention can be derived from a reading of exemplary claim 1, which is reproduced
below.
1. An apparatus for inspecting a planar surface of a disk for use in a
disk drive comprising:
means for scanning a laser beam (the incident beam) over at least
a portion of a first planar surface of the disk to generate a reflected beam;
a detector for converting an intensity of the reflected beam from the
planar surface into an analog signal;
means for sampling and digitizing the analog signal to generate
pixel data stored in a buffer;
means for calculating a rate of change in the intensity of the
reflected beam from the pixel data; and
means for applying a selected threshold to the rate of change in the
intensity of the reflected beam to identify defects or features.
The prior art references of record relied upon by the examiner in rejecting the
appealed claims are:
Cuthbert et al. (Cuthbert) 3,790,287 Feb. 5, 1974
Boehnlein et al. (Boehnlein) 5,307,152 Apr. 26, 1994
Bou-Ghannam et al. (Bou-Ghannam) 5,710,631 Jan. 20, 1998
(filed Jan. 27, 1997)
Womack et al. (Womack) 5,818,592 Oct. 6, 1998
(filed Feb. 7, 1997)
2
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