Patent ID: 9733640
Date: 2017-08-15
CPC Classifications: G03F,G05B,G06F

Claim:
1. A method comprising: providing design data for a reticle that specify cell-to-cell regions containing repeating patterns or structures in the reticle and reticle dimension descriptions having a particular resolution, wherein the reticle design data is usable to fabricate the reticle; generating, from the cell-to-cell regions, cell-to-cell region descriptions for only the identical regions of the cell-to-cell regions and generating, from the reticle dimension descriptions, a grayscale image of the reticle that has a lower resolution than the particular resolution of the dimension descriptions of the reticle; generating a design database that includes the generated cell-to-cell region descriptions and the grayscale image of the reticle; compressing and encrypting the design database to produce a reduced design database; and using the reduced design database to inspect the reticle by scanning a beam across the reticle in an inspection tool and thereby acquiring an image of the reticle with a sensor of the inspection tool.