Appeal No. 2005-2310
Application 10/287,168
out above regarding the rejection of claim 1 over Leonard, the
appellant’s claims do not exclude die to die comparison.
The appellant argues that Omae picks a reference substrate
and then corrects it, whereas the appellant’s master image is a
master not by virtue of having been corrected, but by being
imaged from a known good device believed to be substantially free
of defects (brief, page 11; reply brief, page 9). The
appellant’s claim 1 requires “creating a defect free master image
by imaging an article believed to be substantially free of
defects to create a defect-free master image”. Omae’s teaching
that 1) in the art generally, an object that is selected from a
plurality of objects to be imaged to form a reference pattern
image is one with relatively few defects, and 2) there is no
guarantee that the selected reference pattern image does not
include any defect at all (col. 1, lines 34-37 and 43-46),
indicates that the object selected for imaging to form the
reference pattern image is one that is believed to be
substantially free of defects. Omae images such an object to
create a defect-free master image and, if the image has a defect,
image is compared to images of other substrates (col. 9,
lines 19-22 and 44-50).
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