Kla Tencor Corporation

Chun Guan

Yalin Xiong

Mark Joseph Wihl

Joseph M Blecher

Robert A Comstock

Carl Hess

John D Miller

Shi Rui-Fang

A reticle that is within specifications is inspected to generate baseline candidate defects and their location and size. After using the reticle in photolithography, the reticle is inspected to generate current candidate defects and their location and size. An inspection report of filtered candidate defects and their images is generated so that these candidate defects include a first subset of the current candidate defects and their images and exclude a second subset of the current candidate defects and their images. Each of the first subset of candidate defects has a location and size that fails to match any baseline candidate defect's location and size, and each of the excluded second subset of candidate defects has a location and size that matches a baseline candidate defect's location and size.

Monitoring changes in photomask defectivity

A reticle that is within specifications is inspected so as to generate a baseline event indicating a location and a size value for each unusual reticle feature. After using the reticle in photolithography, the reticle is inspected so as to generate a current event indicating a location and a size value for each unusual reticle feature. An inspection report of candidate defects and their images is generated so that these candidate defects include a first subset of the current events and their corresponding candidate defect images and exclude a second subset of the current events and their corresponding excluded images. Each of the first included events has a location and size value that fails to match any baseline event's location and size value, and each of the excluded second events has a location and size value that matches a baseline event's location and size value.

A semiconductor inspection apparatus identifies regions of a reticle or semiconductor wafer appropriate for cell-to-cell inspection by analyzing a semiconductor design database. Appropriate regions can be identified in a region map for use by offline inspection tools.

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Dublin, CA, United States of America

Chun Guan