Appeal No. 2006-3246
Application No. 09/956,849
all of the claims pending in this application. All other claims have been
canceled by the preliminary amendment filed Mar. 5, 2002.
We AFFIRM-in-PART.
BACKGROUND
Appellants’ invention relates to methods and systems for determining a
property of a specimen prior to, during, or subsequent to lithography. An
understanding of the invention can be derived from a reading of exemplary
claim 6192, which is reproduced below.
6192. A system configured to determine at least one
property of a specimen during use, comprising:
a lithography track configured to perform one or more
steps of a lithography process on the specimen during use;
a spectroscopic ellipsometer coupled to the lithography
track, wherein the spectroscopic ellipsometer is configured to
generate one or more output signals responsive to the at least
one property of the specimen during use; and
a processor coupled to the spectroscopic ellipsometer,
wherein the processor is configured to determine the at least
one property of the specimen from the one or more output
signals during use.
PRIOR ART
The prior art references of record relied upon by the Examiner in
rejecting the appealed claims are:
Moore 5,872,632 Feb. 16, 1999
Yoshioka et al. (Yoshioka) 5,968,691 Oct. 19, 1999
Jann et al. (Jann) 5,189,481 Feb. 23, 1993
Kuriyama et al. (Kuriyama) 4,865,445 Sep. 12, 1982
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