Patent 7880151 was granted and assigned to FEI Company on February, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An improved method and apparatus of beam processing corrects for beam drift while a beam is processing a sample. The beam position is aligned using a fiducial that is sufficiently near the working area so that the fiducial can be imaged and the sample processed without a stage moving. During processing, the beam positioning is corrected for drift using a model that predicts the drift.