Patent ID: 8277281

Claim:
A process control system for use with a processing tool for patterning a thin film by a material removal processing which is to be sequentially applied to a stream of substantially identical articles, the system comprising: an optical end-point detector operable within a working area defined by the processing tool when said processing tool is applied to an article, the optical end-point detector performing in-situ measurements of parameters of patterned thin film on the article under a material removal processing; an optical integrated monitoring tool installed with the processing tool and operable outside said working area for measuring parameters of the patterned thin film on the article in at least one of before and after patterning of the thin film on the article; and a control unit connected to the end-point detector and to the integrated monitoring tool, the control unit including processing and computational intelligence responsive to data received from the end-point detector and to the measured data received from the integrated monitoring tool for analyzing these data and generating a signal for terminating the patterning of the thin film on the article.