Patent 9965848 was granted and assigned to KLA-Tencor on May, 2018 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Shape primitives are used for inspection of a semiconductor wafer or other workpiece. The shape primitives can define local topological and geometric properties of a design. One or more rules are applied to the shape primitives. The rules can indicate presence of a defect or the likelihood of a defect being present. A rule execution engine can search for an occurrence of the shape primitives covered by the at least one rule.