PATENT CLAIM ANALYSIS

Application Number: 15880158
Application Type: Utility
Filing Date: 2018-01
Publication Date: 2018-07
Patent Classification: ["356", "237500"]

Abstract:
A photomask blank having a thin film on a transparent substrate is inspected for defects by irradiating inspection light to a surface region of the blank, collecting the reflected light from the irradiated region via an inspection optical system to form a magnified image of the region, extracting a feature parameter of light intensity distribution from the magnified image, and identifying the bump/pit shape of the defect based on the feature parameter combined with the structure of the thin film. The defect inspection method is effective for discriminating defects of bump or pit shape in a highly reliable manner. On application of the defect inspection method, photomask blanks having no pinhole defects are available at lower costs and higher yields.

Claim (Index 5):
The method of  claim 4  wherein provided that the outermost surface of the photomask blank under inspection is a thin film which is transparent to the inspection light, when a feature parameter indicating that the magnified image of the defect is a bright part-predominant image is extracted in step (A3), the defect detected is identified to be a pinhole defect.

Metadata:
- Claim Count in Document: 3.0
- Percentile: 86.0
- Lexical Diversity: 1.73973
- Patent Class: 356.0
- Transitional Phrase Type: none
- Component Type: 0
- Foreign Priority: True
- Related Applications: ['15181691', '15256111', '14921076', '14716213', '14878181']

Analysis Scores:
- 35 USC 101 Eligibility (BERT): 0.7879372092163778
- 35 USC 102 Novelty (BERT): 0.5781815164350674
- Combined Prediction Score: 0.7669616399382468
- Mean Citation Score: 394.14107
- Max Citation Score: 531.0924
- Similarity Product: 389.0650462310313

Labels:
- Claim Label 101: 1
- Claim Label 102: 1
- Claim Label 103: 1
- Claim Label 112: 1
- Combined Label: 1
- Label 101 Adjusted: 1

Dataset: test