Appeal No. 2005-2310
Application 10/287,168
out where Leonard limits the disclosure to a die to die system.
Regardless, the appellant’s claim 1 is not limited to a die to
die system. The claim does not prevent the article believed to
be substantially free of defects and the article under inspection
from being dies on the same reticle. In fact, the appellant’s
specification states that “in the case where only the die (and
not the inter die) area needs to be inspected, it is sufficient
to identify a master die, and use an image of the master die for
inspection of all dies on the reticles” (page 6, lines 24-26).
The appellant argues that Leonard does not store a reference
image but, rather, stores points extracted from the reference
image and then, to check the topology of a circuit under test,
regenerates the reference image from the stored points (reply
brief, page 7). Leonard compresses the reference image data,
stores the compressed data, and regenerates the reference image
for comparison to the image under test (col. 9, lines 29-45).
The appellant likewise compresses the master image data when
recording the master image, and expands the master image data
when inspecting using the master (specification, page 7,
lines 18-25; page 11, lines 16-20).
same reticle” (specification, page 2, lines 4-5).
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Last modified: November 3, 2007