US 11402313

I'll run searches on the patent number and any 2026 litigation/docket activity, then summarize.

Search scope and limits

I searched for US 11,402,313 specifically (patent number, title, assignee, and litigation-specific queries pairing the number with "CAFC 2026 / district court / infringement complaint"). Findings regarding prosecution history, claims and bibliographic data come from the patent text you supplied (Google Patents, fetched 2026‑09‑24), cross-checked against Justia, FreePatentsOnline and PatentLeaderboard.

On the CAFC 2026 dockets: I found no litigation, IPR, or Federal Circuit appeal involving US 11,402,313. Two searches targeting that number returned zero relevant hits (the second returned no results at all). The only 2026 Tokyo Electron legal news surfaced was unrelated to this patent (a Taiwan criminal trade‑secret case concerning TSMC, which Tokyo Electron's Taiwan unit said it would not appeal — Reuters, ~May 21, 2026). I could not access PACER/CourtListener/Docket Alarm directly, so treat the "no litigation found" statement as not found by search, not as an authoritative negative.

Bibliographic summary

Abstract (verbatim)

"A foreign substance detection device includes a flow path unit through which a fluid is flown; an optical system configured to flatten a laser light from a laser source to be lengthened in a direction intersecting with a flow direction of the fluid; a laser light irradiation unit provided such that an optical path intersects with the flow direction and configured to irradiate the laser light into the flow path unit; a light detection unit which is provided on the optical path having passed through the flow path unit and includes light receiving elements arranged in a lengthwise direction of a transversal cross section of the optical path; a foreign substance detection unit configured to compare a signal level corresponding to intensity of light received by each light receiving element with a threshold value and configured to detect the foreign substance based on a comparison result."

Plain-language overview of the independent claim(s)

Claim 1 (the only independent claim I could verify with confidence — a device claim). The claim covers an apparatus that detects foreign matter (particles, bubbles, oversized "abnormal" polymer in resist) in a liquid being fed to a wafer while that liquid is flowing, rather than by sampling. Parse:

1. A plurality of flow path units through which the fluid supplied to the workpiece flows (described in the specification as an array of eleven quartz "cuvettes" 15A–15K, each a rectangular through‑hole flow path roughly 2 mm × 200 µm; the cuvettes are supplied from the resist/thinner/other chemical lines via valves).
2. A laser light irradiation unit that includes an optical system that flattens the laser light so that the beam is elongated in a direction intersecting the fluid flow direction (the specification uses a Powell/laser‑line‑generator lens to make a flat, elongated beam — an elliptical spot ~120 µm long × ~1.88 µm high in the detection region, with substantially uniform energy density along its length). The unit is arranged so the optical path crosses the flow path.
3. A light detection unit downstream on the passed‑through optical path, comprising multiple light receiving elements arrayed along the lengthwise direction of the beam's cross‑section (64 photodiodes in a 2×32 matrix, paired into 32 channels).
4. A foreign substance detection unit that compares a signal level derived from the electrical signal of each light receiving element against a threshold corresponding to the signal level produced when an interference pattern is generated by a foreign substance in the fluid, and detects the substance from the comparison result. (Mechanically: a particle passing through the beam perturbs the light, changing the received intensity; if the output exceeds the threshold, a foreign object is counted, and the magnitude gives its size class.)
5. A moving mechanism that moves the laser irradiation unit and light detection unit relative to the plurality of flow path units, so a selected one of the flow paths can be interrogated (in the specification, a stage 43 shuttling the optics left‑right across the cuvette array, which is why one light source split six ways can serve all modules).

The inventive thrust is not merely "shine a laser and look for scattering" (that is the admitted prior art, said to be different "in a principle in which the detection is made," and is characterized in the specification as the approach of the cited prior art). It is: (a) flatten the beam so a long, thin sheet of light spans much more of the flow‑path cross‑section, raising the fraction of passing foreign matter that is actually intercepted — reported counting efficiencies of 1%, 0.2% and 0.002% for 60/46/29 nm particles with an elliptical spot vs. 0.02%, 0.004% and 0.0003% for a 1.2 µm circular spot; and (b) split the elongated detection region into many small sub‑regions each imaged onto its own detector channel so that each channel sees relatively few normal polymers, suppressing the polymer‑derived noise floor and shot noise, improving S/N for nanoscale foreign matter. The preferred embodiment pairs upper/lower elements per channel (45A/45B) fed to transimpedance amplifiers 47A/47B and a differential circuit 48, so that common‑mode noise is subtracted out.

Dependent claims I could verify: claim 2 (condensing‑region length 10–200 µm along the intersecting direction); claim 3 (a condensing lens downstream matching each detector element one‑to‑one with a corresponding split sub‑region of the condensing region); claim 4 (each split sub‑region 1–10 µm long); claim 5 (multiple "first" light receiving elements on one side of the beam and multiple "second" light receiving elements on the other side, both arrayed along the cross‑section lengthwise direction — the A/B pair architecture).

Uncertainty flags — please verify against the official record:

• The granted claim 1 text I retrieved differs materially from the claim 1 published in the application (the published version recited "a flow path unit" in the singular and omitted the moving mechanism). This is consistent with amendment during prosecution but I cannot confirm the examiner's reasons or the amendment history from the sources available to me.
• My sources displayed claims only through claim 5 before truncating. I therefore cannot state with confidence how many claims were granted, nor whether a separate independent method claim exists (the disclosure contains a "foreign substance detection method" counterpart, and the specification's summary of the invention recites both device and method aspects). Treat the method claim's presence/scope as unverified.
• The prior art citation is internally inconsistent across copies of the document: the full text you supplied says "Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent No. 5,719,473," while a PDF copy of the US 2021/0190661 A1 publication surfaced in search shows "Patent Document 1: U.S. Pat. No. 5,719,473." Per your instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I report both literally. The classification metadata on the Google Patents page associates JP5719473B1 with "Particle counter for chemicals" (Rion Co., Ltd.), which is consistent with the Japanese‑number reading.
• Legal status ("Active," expiration 2039‑11‑21) is a database assumption, not a legal conclusion, and the 2039 date presumably reflects patent term adjustment plus the 20‑year term from the Jan. 10, 2017 PCT filing.

I have no authoritative information indicating any 2026 litigation, IPR, or CAFC docket activity for US 11,402,313, and I am not asserting that none exists — only that my searches did not surface any.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 11402313 across litigation-tracking sources.

Initial results returned a different patent (US 12,213,933) — not the number requested. Let me query litigation-specific databases directly.

No litigation hits yet. Let me check patent-specific litigation trackers and dockets directly.

Litigation Search Results: U.S. Patent No. 11,402,313

Bottom line: I found no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 11,402,313 in the sources searched. Below is what I ran, what came back, and the material caveats.

The Patent (for identification, interpreted literally)

Searches performed and results

1. General web / litigation searches on the exact number — US patent 11402313 litigation; "11402313" patent infringement lawsuit; "11,402,313" litigation defendant plaintiff; portal.unifiedpatents.com litigation "11402313"; docketalarm "11402313".

   • Result: No district court action, complaint, or case docket naming this patent.

2. Assignee-focused searches — Tokyo Electron patent 11402313 lawsuit asserted; Tokyo Electron asserts patent foreign substance detection lawsuit 2023 2024 2025.

   • Result: Only unrelated Tokyo Electron matters surfaced (e.g., a 1990s-era Tegal Corp. v. Tokyo Electron America appeal concerning an etch reactor patent, and a 1998 securities filing in E.D. Va. naming Tokyo Electron Limited). Neither involves 11,402,313.

3. CourtListener / Docket Alarm / Unified Patents Portal — attempted targeted queries for the patent number.

   • Result: No responsive case records; the queries exhausted before returning patent-specific docket data.

One important naming caution

Search engines aggressively conflated the number with a different patent, U.S. 12,213,933 B1 (a Hyperice massage‑gun patent at issue in six consolidated 2025 declaratory judgment actions in the Western District of Washington — e.g., Toloco Inc. v. Hyperice IP Subco, LLC, No. 2:25‑cv‑01560‑KKE, with related cases at 2:25‑cv‑01561 through ‑01565). That is not U.S. 11,402,313 and is a distinct patent, owner, technology, and set of parties. I am flagging it only so it is not mistaken for responsive results; per your instruction, I have not substituted or "corrected" the number.

Answers to your specific fields

For 11,402,313:

• Plaintiff(s): None identified
• Defendant(s): None identified
• Jurisdiction: N/A
• Case number: N/A
• Filing date: N/A
• Outcome/status: N/A

No litigation is known as of this search.

Caveats (stated explicitly rather than assumed)

• I could not complete a full sweep of all relevant databases. In particular, I was unable to render the patent's Litigation/PTAB tabs on Google Patents, the Unified Patents Portal patent‑detail page for 11,402,313, or the PACER/ CourtListener docket record for this specific number.
• Patent litigation data is incomplete even in paid databases: some actions (especially those voluntarily dismissed very quickly, or resolved in state court or via arbitration/ITC proceedings) may not appear.
• Absence of results here is not a legal conclusion that the patent has never been asserted, only that no public case was located in the searches run.
• This patent issued in August 2022 and is owned by a large, vertically integrated operating company (Tokyo Electron) that holds patents primarily for defensive/portfolio purposes — which is consistent with (but does not prove) the absence of assertion activity.

Suggested next steps to verify definitively

1. USPTO Patent Center — "Litigation" / "Patent Assignment" and, more importantly, the PTAB tab for IPR/PGR/CBM proceedings against 11,402,313.
2. Unified Patents Portal patent‑detail page: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/11402313 — shows mapped PTAB and litigation activity.
3. CourtListener RECAP and Docket Alarm patent‑number search for 11,402,313.
4. Lex Machina / Docket Navigator — query by patent number, which catches cases where the number appears only in an exhibit or infringement contention rather than the caption.

If you'd like, I can run any of these targeted checks (e.g., the PTAB challenge history) in a follow‑up pass.

I'll verify the structured "no PTAB activity" signal against web sources before writing the analysis.

No PTAB hits so far. Let me run a couple more targeted queries to confirm.

PTAB / AIA Trial Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,402,313 B2

Patent: Foreign substance detection device and foreign substance detection method
Patent Owner: Tokyo Electron Limited | Issued: 2022-08-02 | App. No.: 16/071,122 | Priority: JP 2016-009923 (2016-01-21)

Source of the proceedings list: The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest) is the canonical list and returns no AIA trial proceedings. I independently re-queried the web for IPRs, PGRs, CBMs, and derivative proceedings naming this patent or its family (searches pairing the patent number with "IPR," "PTAB," "petition," "instituted," "final written decision," "Tokyo Electron," "inter partes review," and "PTAB E2E") and surfaced nothing responsive — only generic PTAB statistics pages, unrelated Tokyo Electron patents, and unrelated proceedings involving different patent numbers. I found no basis to override the structured data.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM, no DER, no active trial, no instituted-and-pending trial, no final written decision, no settlement-terminated trial, and no institution denial; accordingly the defensive posture is "no PTAB history exists to lean on — the patent is wholly untested at the Board, and any invalidity attack would be a first-generation challenge you would have to build from scratch."

There are therefore no per-proceeding entries to report. I am not padding this section with fabricated proceeding numbers, petitioners, panels, or dispositions. Everything below concerns the absence of a record and what that absence means.

Verified data points behind the zero count

Strategic summary

Which claims are canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. The complete claim set is untested — there is no PTAB disposition of any kind, so there are no canceled claims, no claims confirmed patentable, and no claim-level estoppel. This is materially different from the normal posture of a patent asserted in litigation, where you would ordinarily expect at least one IPR to have been filed within the § 315(b) window. For a defendant today, that means: (1) you cannot point to a Board ruling that a claim is dead; (2) conversely, you are not facing a "hardened" patent that already survived an invalidity challenge — an institution-rate and merits record is simply unknown; and (3) all of your invalidity contentions must be developed de novo. Note the earlier caveat from the claim-analysis section, which I do not disturb here: the granted claim 1 text differed materially from the pre-grant publication's claim 1 (the published claim recited "a flow path unit" in the singular and omitted the moving mechanism), claims were reported only through claim 5 due to source truncation, and the existence/scope of a separate independent method claim is unverified. Because there is no PTAB record, none of those uncertainties can be resolved from Board filings — they must be resolved from the USPTO file history (Patent Center) and the printed claim set.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel in existence for this patent, because estoppel attaches only upon a final written decision. No petitioner is barred from anything; no privies are captured; no real-party-in-interest or privity chain has been established through a Board proceeding. Practically, that means the full universe of § 102/§ 103 art is available to a challenger — including art that might otherwise have been "reasonably could have raised" territory — subject only to the ordinary constraints of § 325(d) (the Board's discretion to deny petitions presenting the same or substantially the same prior art or arguments previously presented to the Office during examination) and the Director's parallel-litigation discretion under § 314(a) (see below). The prosecution record, including whatever the Examiner considered and the international search report/PCT search history for PCT/JP2017/000436, is the relevant baseline for a § 325(d) risk assessment — and that baseline has not yet been stress-tested by any Board panel for this patent.

Pattern signals. There is no pattern to report: no serial petitioner, no repeat challenger, no defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) in the chain, no joinder activity, no Board appeal activity by the Patent Owner, and no Federal Circuit appeal. The assignee is a large vertically integrated operating company (a semiconductor capital-equipment manufacturer), which is generally consistent with defensive portfolio use rather than assertion-driven exercise — but that is a characteristic inference, not evidence about this patent. The absence of even a single IPR is a genuinely notable signal: well-asserted, commercially significant patents in the semiconductor-equipment space characteristically attract at least one IPR petition, frequently accompanied by a district court stay motion. A zero count on both the PTAB side (per the structured data and my searches) and the litigation side (per the litigation section of this analysis) is internally consistent with a patent that has simply not been asserted.

One piece of forward-looking context worth flagging to a client, clearly labeled. Several 2025–2026 practitioner filings argue that the Office has tightened discretionary denial practice — including, per one advocacy document, constraints tied to parallel litigation and to older patents (Unified Patents amicus brief, SCOTUS No. 25-1230, filed ~2026-05-29, at https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-1230/[412129](/patent/412129)/20260529145347123_Unified%20Amicus%20Brief%2025-1230.pdf). That document is an advocacy brief from an interested party, not authority, and I have not independently verified the underlying Office guidance. I flag it only because it bears on whether a future petition against a 2016-priority patent might face discretionary-denial headwinds. It is not a statement about this patent or a prediction about any filing.

Recommended next steps

1. State it plainly to the client: there is no PTAB record for US 11,402,313. No PTAB proceeding exists per the structured USPTO Open Data Portal list in this prompt, and none was surfaced by search. Do not represent this as an affirmative legal finding that none will ever be filed — IPR is available for the life of the patent and the § 315(b) bar has not been triggered because no infringement complaint has been served (per the litigation search). The absence is a measured signal, not a conclusion.

2. Re-verify the zero count at the primary sources before relying on it in any filing or demand response.

   • PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ — search by patent number.
   • USPTO Patent Center for the application's Litigation/PTAB tabs: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ (application 16/071,122; patent 11,402,313).
   • Google Patents Litigation/PTAB tabs: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402313/en
   • CourtListener RECAP and Docket Alarm for both the patent number and the Patent Owner; note that Docket Alarm records include exhibit-level PDFs, so a patent can appear in a case without appearing in the caption.
   • Unified Patents Portal patent-detail page for mapped PTAB and litigation activity (I could not render the page for this number in this session; treat that as an access failure, not a negative result).

3. If you are a defendant evaluating an IPR, the practical operating points are:

   • No estoppel and no 315(b) bar exist yet. If you have been served with a complaint, start the § 315(b) one-year clock immediately upon service — that clock is the single most consequential date in IPR planning, and Click-to-Call (Fed. Cir. 2018) confirms that even a voluntarily dismissed complaint can trigger it.
   • Build the § 325(d) file early. Because this application was national-phased from PCT/JP2017/000436 and cites Japanese Patent No. 5,719,473, identify precisely which art was before the Examiner and which art is new; that distinction drives whether a petition risks § 325(d) discretionary denial.
   • Trial-stage deadlines once (and if) a petition is filed: institution decision within 6 months of the petition (35 U.S.C. § 314(b)); any instituted trial carries a statutory 1-year FWD deadline from institution (§ 316(a)(11)) — note the earlier section's related point that the Precedential/standard practice and SAS v. Iancu (2018) require the Board to address all challenged claims and grounds.
   • The claim set itself needs verification first. Before drafting grounds, pull the granted claims from Patent Center. The earlier section could not confirm the total claim count, could not confirm whether a separate independent method claim was granted, and flagged a discrepancy between published claim 1 and granted claim 1. Building an invalidity theory on the published (pre-grant) claim 1 as quoted in the abstract/summary would be a mistake — that text recites "a flow path unit" singular and omits the moving mechanism.

4. If the patent has been asserted against you and there is still no IPR on file, that is itself an unusual posture worth investigating: confirm whether any co-defendant, licensee, or indemnitor has already filed (and whether a bar has run against you specifically under § 315(b) or § 315(a)(1) via a civil action challenging validity). A zero count in public sources can coexist with a recently filed, not-yet-indexed petition, so re-run the PTAB E2E check at the time you actually need to rely on it.

Explicit limitations on this analysis

• The "no proceedings" conclusion rests on (a) the structured ODP block supplied in this prompt, which is stated to be the canonical list, and (b) my own web searches, which returned no responsive records. It does not rest on a completed sweep of PTAB E2E, PACER, Unified Patents Portal, Lex Machina, or Docket Navigator — I was unable to render patent-detail pages for several of those sources.
• Absence of PTAB activity is not a legal opinion that the patent is valid, invalid, or unchallengeable. It is a factual statement about the public record as indexed.
• No proceeding numbers, docket numbers, panel members, petition grounds, institution decisions, final written decisions, settlements, or appeal dispositions are reported in this section, because none exist and none may be invented.

I'll research the assignment/ownership record for US 11,402,313 across the USPTO Assignment Center, Google Patents legal events, and asserter directories.

Let me verify the assignment record and check for any post-issuance transfers.

Let me try to pin down the specific assignment reel/frame and check for any post-issuance transfers.

Assignment / Ownership Analysis — US 11,402,313 B2

Method note and limitation, stated up front. I attempted the Assignment Center / assignment.uspto.gov patent-number lookup, Google Patents legal events, Justia, and asserter-directory cross-checks. I could confirm one recorded conveyance through the Google Patents legal-events feed embedded in the authoritative patent text provided to me, plus corroborating inventor/assignee data from PatentLeaderboard. I could not render the Assignment Center detail view (reel/frame, execution date, correspondent of record) before hitting my tool-call limit, so I do not report a reel/frame number or a correspondent name — those fields are not verified, and I will not guess them. Everything below is limited to what the sources actually show.

Inventors

Departure / attrition pattern: not present. Koudai Higashi's most recent TEL patent issued September 2025, seven years after this application's national-phase entry and three years after this patent granted — inconsistent with the "all inventors departed within 12 months of filing" precursor to a portfolio fire-sale. All four remain credited to TEL on the continuation US 11,906,414, granted 2024‑02‑20 (same title, same four inventors), which shows the same team still filing in this family long after the original filing.

One flag to verify: PatentLeaderboard exposes a "Kohei Noguchi" page titled 23 Patents at Honda Motor Co. that also lists 7 Tokyo Electron patents (including this one). Given how common the name is, I read this as a probable name-conflation artifact in the aggregator, not as evidence that inventor Noguchi moved to Honda. I am flagging it rather than asserting a departure, because I could not resolve the identity. Treat as unclear; do not treat as a finding.

Original assignee

Tokyo Electron Limited (current and original assignee; no intervening owner).

• Line of business: Tokyo Electron (TEL) is a Japanese semiconductor and flat-panel-display production equipment manufacturer — the market leader in coaters/developers (the CLEAN TRACK line), and a major supplier of etch, deposition, and cleaning tools. It is a publicly listed operating company (Tokyo Stock Exchange, 8035) and files 10-K-equivalent annual reports (有価証券報告書) and 8-K-equivalent disclosures; it is repeatedly cited as holding the largest active patent portfolio in the semiconductor equipment industry — 23,249 active patents as of 2024‑03‑31 (TEL IP strategy analysis, Oct 2025).
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes, on the face of the specification. The patent's own FIG. 1/3 disclosure places the claimed foreign-substance detection unit inside TEL's own resist coating module (coater/developer) and states that detection occurs concurrently with the discharge of resist onto the wafer — i.e., the claimed device is integrated into a shipping TEL product, not merely a paper right. FY2025 R&D was ¥274.6 billion, consistent with an active internal R&D/IP program rather than an acquisition vehicle.
• Current status: Operating, solvent, no bankruptcy, no acquisition. No change of name, merger, or reorganization affecting this patent appears in the record.

Assignment timeline

Google Patents' legal-events feed for this patent (as supplied in the authoritative full text) shows exactly one ownership conveyance:

• Recorded 2018‑07‑19 — Reel/Frame: not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (the standard § 371 national-phase perfection of the inventors' rights to the applicant)
  • Assignor: HAYASHI, MASATO; NOGUCHI, KOHEI; KAJIWARA, DAISUKE; HIGASHI, KOUDAI (the four named inventors, jointly)
  • Assignee: TOKYO ELECTRON LIMITED
  • Execution date: not retrieved. Recording date 2018‑07‑19 coincides with the U.S. national-phase entry date (application 16/071,122 bears a July‑2018 series), which is the ordinary time for this recording.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. I cannot confirm and will not speculate. No recurrence analysis is possible for this patent.
  • Context: Acquisition — routine inventor-to-employer assignment at national-phase entry; the employer held the PCT/JP priority rights as applicant.

Two related events are not assignments and are listed only to separate them from the chain:

• 2017‑01‑10 — Application filed by Tokyo Electron Ltd (applicant event, not a recorded assignment).
• 2021‑06‑24 — Publication of US 2021/0190661 A1 (publication event).
• 2022‑08‑02 — Patent granted.

No post-issuance assignment of any kind was found. No security agreement, no license record, no merger, no change of name, no release, no correction, and no transfer to any third party or licensing entity. Per your instruction, the plain reading is: the original assignee still owns the patent outright, and it is an operating company.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402313
    2016 : Priority filing in Japan by inventors
    2017 : PCT and US application filed by Tokyo Electron
    2018 : Inventors assign rights to Tokyo Electron
    2022 : US patent 11402313 granted
    2024 : Continuation 11906414 granted to same owner

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Contradictions / cross-references to earlier sections

• No contradiction with the litigation section. That section found no district-court action, IPR, or CAFC appeal for 11,402,313. The assignment record is consistent: there is no litigation-enabling transfer (signal 5 is negative), so there is no ownership-side support for assertion activity.
• Secondary caution, carried forward: results for this number were repeatedly conflated by search engines with US 12,213,933 B1 (Hyperice massage gun, W.D. Wash. 2025 declaratory judgment actions). That is a different patent and a different owner; I have not substituted it. Note also that Hyperice is a real NPE-flavored fact pattern (patent asserted against many defendants), so if this conflation recurs in a database query, it can manufacture a false "high-frequency plaintiff" signal for 11,402,313. Treated here as noise, per your instruction not to auto-correct identifiers.
• Family note: continuation US 11,906,414 (granted 2024‑02‑20, same title, same four TEL inventors) indicates this is a prosecuted family, not an abandoned one-off, and it is likewise owned by the operating company.

Verdict

Insufficient data — under your definition, this is the bucket for a patent with "only the original assignment," which is precisely the record here.

Strictly on the evidence: the entire ownership record is a single conveyance — inventors Hayashi, Noguchi, Kajiwara, and Higashi to Tokyo Electron Limited, recorded 2018‑07‑19 (reel/frame and correspondent not retrieved) — with no subsequent transfer of any kind. All eight NPE signals are not present (one is insufficient data), so this is not an NPE case under any theory; the "insufficient data" label reflects the thinness of the transfer record rather than any ambiguity about who owns the patent, which is unambiguously the original operating-company assignee.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 11402313; the indexed mirror at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html surfaces the same underlying records). Run that lookup to capture the reel/frame, execution date, and correspondent fields I could not retrieve, and to confirm the negative finding on post-issuance transfers.

I'll search the USPTO and patent-citation sources for US 11,402,313 and its cited references.

Let me pull the citation lists specific to US 11,402,313 from patent databases.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,402,313 B2

Important framing before the analysis: I attempted to render the granted patent's own face page "(56) References Cited" list (Google Patents / Patent Center). Those pages did not render for me within the search budget, so the citation list below is drawn from the Google Patents citation tables surfaced for the published application US 2021/0190661 A1 and for family members (e.g., US20210190661A1, CN113702269B, JP5719473B1). Because the US 11,402,313 grant is the national-stage child of the same PCT (PCT/JP2017/000436), the IDS/citation set is normally co-extensive — but I have not verified the literal contents of the (56) box on the granted US patent, and I have not retrieved the non-patent-literature (NPL) citations or the ISR for PCT/JP2017/000436. Treat the roster below as "the citation set of the family as reflected in Google Patents," not as a certified copy of the U.S. face page.

Identifier rule compliance: the specification's own citation is internally inconsistent. The full text supplied says "Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent No. 5,719,473"; the pre-grant publication PDF says "Patent Document 1: U.S. Pat. No. 5,719,473" (US20210190661A1 PDF). Per your instruction I do not auto-correct either. They are literally different documents. Google Patents' metadata associates JP5719473B1 with Rion Co., Ltd., "Particle counter for chemicals" — which is consistent with the Japanese-number reading, and Google Patents shows US11402313B2 among the "Cited By" documents on the JP5719473B1 page, i.e., the US patent cites the JP document. I flag the U.S.-number variant as an unresolved discrepancy, not an error to be fixed.

1. The cited reference set (identified)

Google Patents reports "Patent Citations (12)" for the family member page I could read; I enumerated 13 rows plus the P1 citation, so the exact count and membership on the U.S. face page is unverified — one or two of the above may belong to a sibling family member (e.g., CN113702269B) rather than to US 11,402,313 itself. Verify against the grant's printed (56) list.

Same-family documents (NOT prior art) — the grant's own family includes a continuation, US 11,906,414 B2, "Foreign substance detection device and foreign substance detection method," Tokyo Electron Limited, granted 2024‑02‑20 (shown under "Cited By" on US20120078531). Same priority (2016‑01‑21); it is a sibling, not art.

Searches that produced false positives, explicitly excluded: the ISRs for WO 2017/108494 (PCT/EP2016/080732) and WO 2019/152079 surfaced references such as US 2010/277040 (Klee), US 2012/277639, US 2013/261465 (Nakamura), US 5,339,291, GB 2 328 748, US 2015/049586 (Sakaguchi), US 2002/039186 (von Rosenberg) — these belong to other applications' search reports and I do not attribute them to US 11,402,313.

2. § 102 anticipation assessment, reference by reference

For § 102, a reference must disclose every element of a claim as arranged in the claim. Taking the granted claim 1 elements as: (a) flow-path unit for fluid destined for a workpiece; (b) laser irradiation unit with an optical system that flattens the beam so it is elongated in a direction intersecting the flow direction, optical path crossing the flow; (c) light detection unit downstream with multiple light receiving elements arrayed along the lengthwise direction of the beam cross-section; (d) a detection unit comparing a signal level to a threshold corresponding to the level produced when an interference pattern is generated by the foreign substance; and (e) (per the granted text as previously retrieved) a moving mechanism indexing the optics relative to a plurality of flow paths:

Overall § 102 conclusion (on the record available): None of the cited references, standing alone, appears to anticipate granted claim 1, and a fortiori none anticipates dependent claims 2–5 (condensing-region length 10–200 µm; 1:1 condensing-lens-to-element correspondence per split sub-region; 1–10 µm sub-regions; the first/second opposed receiver arrays A/B). The cited set reads as background/context art ("A"-category in ISR terms) plus, at most, the two references the applicant himself acknowledged distinguished on the merits: JP 5719473 (Rion) and the applicant's own CN 101685070 A (TEL).

Where a § 102 or § 103 challenge would actually be built (my assessment, clearly labeled as opinion):

• § 103 combination: JP 5719473 B1 (Rion) for the flow-path + laser-across-flow + multiple-receiver + threshold architecture, in view of a line-generator/Powell-lens beam-shaping teaching from the optical-measurement art and a flow-cytometry detector-array teaching (CN 102308197 A / CN 102334021 A / CN 1987420 A) for "many small receivers arrayed across the beam cross-section to reduce per-channel polymer noise." The applicant's own specification supplies the motivation (obviating shot noise and normal-polymer noise floor). That is the natural § 103 attack map.
• § 102 single-reference risk concentrated in CN 101685070 A (TEL) — same applicant, same problem statement, optical foreign-matter detection in a treatment liquid coating apparatus, published 2010. Its actual disclosure must be read before any anticipation statement is possible; on today's record I can only flag it.
• § 102(b)/§ 102(a)(1) statutory-bar angle: any of refs 1–13 and P1 published more than one year before 2016‑01‑21, so they are available as § 102(a)(1) art regardless of the pre‑AIA/AIA posture. That is a prior-art-date point, not an anticipation finding.

Claims potentially implicated — the only claims I verified with confidence are claim 1 (independent, device) and dependents 2–5. If a separate independent method claim was granted (the specification and the published claim set recite a "foreign substance detection method" counterpart; I could not confirm its grant), the same references map substantially one-for-one onto the method steps (flowing fluid → flattening → irradiating across the flow → receiving on multiple lengthwise-arrayed elements → comparing to an interference-pattern threshold), so the anticipation and § 103 conclusions above carry over.

3. Contradictions and open items to resolve against the official record

1. "Patent Document 1" identifier conflict — "Japanese Patent No. 5,719,473" (full text supplied) vs. "U.S. Pat. No. 5,719,473" (pre-grant publication PDF). Both reported literally; not corrected. Google Patents ties US 11,402,313 to JP5719473B1 as a cited document.
2. Exact (56) list unverified — the "12 cited" count I saw does not cleanly match the 13 rows I enumerated plus P1; membership must be confirmed from the grant.
3. Non-patent literature unverified — no NPL citations retrieved (the specification's own evaluation data on counting efficiency — 1%/0.2%/0.002% for 60/46/29 nm with the elliptical spot vs. 0.02%/0.004%/0.0003% with a 1.2 µm circular spot — appears to be applicant-generated test data, not cited art).
4. ISR for PCT/JP2017/000436 not retrieved, so any "X"/"Y"-categorized references the ISA actually relied on are not represented here.
5. Number conflation caution: search engines repeatedly returned US 12,213,933 (Hyperice massage-gun patent, W.D. Wash. 2025 DJ actions) for the query string — that is a different patent and is excluded.

4. Sources

• Full patent text supplied in this analysis (Google Patents, fetched 2026‑09‑24) — specification, background, and the "Patent Document 1" citation.
• US20210190661A1 (Google Patents) — citation table and paragraph [0005].
• US20210190661A1 PDF — "Patent Document 1: U.S. Pat. No. 5,719,473."
• JP5719473B1 (Google Patents) — "Particle counter for chemicals," Rion Co., Ltd.; shows US11402313B2 as a citing document.
• CN113702269B (Google Patents) — family citation table (12 rows enumerated above).
• US20120078531 (Google Patents) — shows US11906414B2 / US11402313B2 family entries.
• Justia, FreePatentsOnline US2021/0190661, PatentLeaderboard — bibliographic cross-checks.

If you want, I can run a focused pass on CN 101685070 A (TEL) and on the ISR for PCT/JP2017/000436 — those two are the only items capable of changing the § 102 conclusion above.

I'll ground this analysis in the prior art tied to this patent, starting with the cited reference and the surrounding art on elongated-beam particle detection.

The cited reference resolves cleanly — let me pull its family member and hunt for the other art families that map to the claim elements.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,402,313 B2

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103 (AIA), as of the current analysis date

0. What this section builds on (and one record correction)

Building on the earlier sections: the patent is Tokyo Electron's foreign-substance detector for liquids being fed to a wafer, and the earlier summary correctly identified the inventive thrust as (a) a flattened, elongated beam + (b) a detection region split into many sub-regions each imaged onto its own detector channel, with an admitted-prior-art "shine a laser and look for scattering" baseline.

Two record items resolved by this pass, which materially affect the § 103 analysis:

1. The "Patent Document 1" ambiguity is resolved against the U.S. reading. My search returned the literal U.S. patent numbered 5,719,473: "US5719473A – High frequency operating circuit with in-rush current protection for operation of discharge lamps" (Google Patents). That is an unrelated lamp-ballast patent. By contrast, JP 5719473 B1 is confirmed as "Particle counter for chemicals," Rion Co., Ltd., priority JP 2014‑195877 (2014‑09‑25), with U.S. family member US 9,823,190 B2, "Particle counter for chemical solution" (Minakami et al.), pre‑grant publication US 2016/0091407 A1, filed US 14/859,780 on 2015‑09‑21 (JP5719473B1; US9823190B2). Per your instruction I am not "correcting" the identifier — I am reporting that the JP reading is the one that maps to a real, on‑point reference, and that the '313 patent's own "Cited By" linkage on the JP publication page lists US 11,402,313 B2 as a citing document. This is the primary reference for everything below.

2. AIA timing. The '313 patent's effective filing date is 2016‑01‑21 (JP 2016‑009923) / PCT filed 2017‑01‑10 — post‑AIA. Rion's U.S. application was effectively filed 2015‑09‑21, before that date, so US 2016/0091407 A1 and US 9,823,190 B2 qualify as § 102(a)(2) prior art (different inventor, effectively filed earlier). This matters: Rion is available as prior art notwithstanding that its publication post-dates the '313 priority date.

1. Claim basis and the limits of this opinion

I am analyzing against the claim set as reconstructed in the earlier sections: claim 1 (device: plural flow path units; laser irradiation unit with a beam-flattening optical system whose optical path crosses the flow; light detection unit downstream on the passed-through optical path with multiple elements arrayed along the beam cross-section's lengthwise direction; a foreign-substance detection unit comparing signal level to a threshold "corresponding to a signal level … obtained when an interference pattern is generated by the foreign substance"; plus a moving mechanism to select among the flow path units); claims 2–5 as previously described; and the method claim flagged as unverified.

Flags carried forward (do not treat as settled):

• The granted claim 1 differs from the published claim 1 (singular "flow path unit," no moving mechanism). This suggests the allowance hook is the combination of the plural-flow-path/moving-optics element with the flattened-beam detection, and an obviousness attack should be aimed there.
• I still cannot confirm the total number of granted claims or the existence/scope of an independent method claim. Claims 1–5 only.
• No prosecution-history estoppel analysis is possible without the file wrapper.

2. Legal framework applied

Under Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), the inquiry is the scope/content of the prior art, the differences from the claims, PHOSITA level, and secondary considerations. KSR instructs that a motivation to combine may be found in the design incentive, market demand, or the known problem — it need not be stated in the references (In re Fulton), and a combination of known elements with predictable results is obvious. The most useful MPEP 2143 groupings here:

• (A) Known elements combined by known methods → predictable result.
• (C) Known technique used to improve a similar device in the same way.
• (D) Known technique applied to a known device "ready for improvement."
• (F/G) Design incentives, market forces, and predictable variation / routine optimization of ranges (MPEP 2144.05; In re Aller).

PHOSITA here: an optical-instrumentation engineer (B.S. + 3–5 yrs) with semiconductor process-chemical metrology experience — comfortable with laser beam shaping, photodiode arrays, transimpedance front ends, and pulse-height threshold counting.

3. The prior-art landscape (with confidence labels)

4. Element-by-element mapping to claim 1

Assessment: RION alone does not anticipate claim 1 (no flat beam, no transmitted-light geometry, no moving optics). Claims 3 and 4, however, are very close to anticipated by RION's sub-region/element mapping and 10× condensing magnification.

5. Combinations that render the claims obvious

Combination A — the primary attack: RION + FLAT‑JET (+ JET‑20) + OBS‑COUNT/GAS‑ARRAY

Covers: claims 1, 2, 3, 4 (and arguably 5 with Combination D).

Motivation:

1. Common problem, parallel development (KSR). RION and the '313 patent address the same problem in the same field, using the same litmus test: RION states that miniaturization to 20 nm half‑pitch creates demand for counting 0.03 µm particles in chemicals, and explains why it is hard — "when particles have a particle size sufficiently smaller than the wavelength … the intensity of scattered light … is proportional to the sixth power of the particle size … the pulse height value is lowered as the particle size is smaller." The '313 patent's Background states the identical problem ("an allowable particle size tends to become further smaller … S/N is decreased"). Two entities independently recognizing the same need is the classic KSR fact pattern supporting obviousness.
2. RION itself frames the exact tradeoff the flat beam solves. RION concedes that shrinking the irradiation cross-section to raise energy density reduces counting efficiency ("lower than 5%" for a 1×1 mm cell). A PHOSITA confronted with RION's own statement is directly led to the design question: how do I keep energy density high while illuminating more of the flow path? Extending the beam along one axis answers it, because energy density scales as power ÷ illuminated area — stretching one dimension buys coverage in that dimension nearly for free. FLAT‑JET teaches precisely this (elongated beam + elongated jet → all sample illuminated while the light remains "tightly focussed … for high sensitivity"), and JET‑20 confirms the ~20 µm line geometry in a liquid stream.
3. RION already supplies the sub-region/channelization half of the invention — with the same rationale. The '313 patent's stated reason for splitting the detection region into 32 channels is to reduce per-channel background noise from normal polymers. RION states verbatim: "Using the light‑receiving element array decreases the areas of the individual light‑receiving elements. This can reduce the noise level resulting from the background light." Same structure, same articulated reason. RION‑MC reinforces it with per-divided-area multi‑channel detection and per-area filter constants.
4. Predictability (MPEP 2143(A)). The '313 patent's own Evaluation test 1 numbers show the result is what geometry predicts. Circular 1.2 µm spot → area ≈ 1.13 µm²; elliptical 40 µm × 1.2 µm spot → area ≈ 48 µm², a ≈42× increase in illuminated cross‑section. Reported counting-efficiency gains: 0.02%→1% (50×), 0.004%→0.2% (50×), 0.0003%→0.002% (≈6.7×). For the two smaller sizes the improvement tracks the geometric area increase almost linearly — i.e., a predictable, proportional result, not an unexpected one. That is fatal to non‑obviousness, and also undercuts any "unexpected results" argument.
5. Transmitted-light detection is the oldest counting principle in the art. GAS‑ARRAY already pairs a beam traversing the flow path ("obscured or scattered") with an array detector. Substituting a transmitted-beam detection geometry for a scattered-light geometry in a particle counter is a known-principle substitution among art-recognized equivalents for the same purpose, and the claims are apparatus claims drafted in functional terms.

For claims 2 and 4 (range recitations): RION's element-to-region size is 19 µm × 40 µm = 760 µm²; the '313 claim 4 range is 1–10 µm and claim 2's condensing-region length is 10–200 µm (embodiment: 120 µm). These are routine optimizations of a disclosed parameter with no unexpected effect, and RION's own 25-element/760 µm² design sits alongside the claimed range such that the ranges are overlapping/similar — the classic MPEP 2144.05/In re Aller situation. Note that the '313 patent's own worked example (120 µm ÷ 32 ≈ 3.75 µm per channel) lands inside claim 4 through an obvious arithmetic division of a design parameter.

For claim 3 (one-to-one region↔element condensing): RION teaches regions 11‑i mapped one-to-one to elements 4‑i via a condensing optical system "designed with a magnification of 10 times." The '313 specification merely explains the reason a PHOSITA would want to preserve that mapping (cross-talk lowers current level and hurts accuracy). This is disclosure-level obviousness at minimum, and arguably anticipation if RION's mapping holds under the claim's wording.

Combination B — RION + FLAT‑JET + EP3460 (flow-cell/laminar-flow optics) + GAS‑ARRAY

Adds EP 0 383 460 B1 for the liquid flow-cell + perpendicular optical axis + stable laminar-flow environment, reinforcing that the '313 cuvette geometry is conventional in liquid particle metrology and that combining an elongated beam and an array detector in a liquid flow cell requires no re-design of the cell.

Motivation: In re Keller / In re Merck — explicit combination motivation is unnecessary where the references are in the same field and the combination does no more than the sum of the parts. Both EP3460 and RION are liquid-borne-particle measuring instruments with a laser traversing the flow; FLAT‑JET supplies the beam geometry; GAS‑ARRAY supplies the obscured-light + array detector combination.

Combination C — RION + Multi‑channel/translating-optics art (for the plural-flow-path + moving-mechanism element)

Motivation (MPEP 2144.03 / design incentives):

• The '313 system feeds 11 cuvettes per module × 6 modules of separately valve-actuated chemical lines. The economic incentive to time-share one laser and one detector across many cuvettes is a straightforward design/cost incentive (KSR: "design incentives and other market forces").
• The specification admits the rationale: the alternative of giving each cuvette its own irradiation/receiving unit is inferior because sharing avoids "scale‑up of the laser light irradiation unit 51 and the light receiving unit 52."
• The specification also admits the surrounding architecture as conventional: the light supply unit's "laser light … split into six laser lights by the splitter 22 to be guided via six fibers 23" is described as ordinary hardware. Splitting one source across multiple measurement points, then translating the measurement head to a selected channel, is a familiar arrangement in clinical chemistry analyzers and multi-point process monitors (e.g., Rion's own RP Monitor K9461/K9462 multipoint monitoring catalog material retrieved in this pass, supporting up to 20 measurement points).
• Movement of a beam-relative-to-flow-path element is a predictable mechanical variation and does nothing more than select which of the (already disclosed) detection regions is interrogated.

Combination D — Combination A + differential/split-detector art (for claim 5)

Claim 5 (multiple "first" elements on the upstream side and multiple "second" elements on the downstream side, both arrayed along the cross-section lengthwise direction) is drawn to what the '313 specification uses only for one stated purpose: "the detection of the foreign substance is performed based on the signal corresponding to the difference between the outputs from the light receiving elements 45A and 45B in order to remove a noise commonly detected by the light receiving elements 45A and 45B." That is common-mode noise rejection by differential photodetection — a textbook technique (paired detectors + differential amplifier), and the '313 patent describes the TIA/TIA/differential-circuit 47A‑47B‑48 architecture as ordinary circuit design.

Motivation: Where a known noise source is common to two detection channels, splitting the beam into two halves and differencing them is a known technique applied for its known purpose; and RION independently teaches that the dominant noise in chemical metrology is background light from the liquid itself (a common-mode disturbance). Caveat: I did not verify a specific split-detector/differential particle-counter reference in this pass. Claim 5 is the weakest link in the chart and should be charted against a concrete reference before relying on it.

6. The two pivots the analysis turns on

(i) Does "light detection unit … on the optical path having passed through the flow path unit" exclude RION's side-scatter geometry?
This is the patentee's strongest structural argument. The claim language is forward-looking ("having passed through"), which is consistent with a transmitted/forward-detection geometry — either forward-scatter or obscuration/extinction. If construed to require transmitted-beam detection (which the specification supports: the detection region is a condensing region within the flow path imaged onto the detector, and the energy distribution of FIG. 9 is of the beam inside the flow path), then GAS‑ARRAY and the obscuration-counter family become the direct primary reference for that element, and RION becomes the secondary reference for the array/sub-region/threshold teachings. Either way the combination holds; but which reference leads changes the chart.

(ii) What does "interference pattern … generated by the foreign substance" mean, and does it limit?
If construed narrowly — as requiring detection of a diffraction/interference pattern (as from a particle occluding a coherent beam) rather than merely a shadow — then the obviousness case needs a reference teaching forward-diffraction/interference-pattern detection with thresholding. I did not locate and verify such a reference in this pass, and I will not assert one exists. If instead it is construed as the specification's own usage (the "reaction light … light perturbed by a reaction" that the region's light receiving element receives), it is a functional recitation of detecting a particle-induced perturbation of a beam against a threshold — which RION and the obscuration counters both disclose. This construction question is decisive and should be resolved from the intrinsic record, not assumed.

7. Anticipated rebuttals and how they fare

8. Bottom line and confidence levels

Verification checklist before this opinion is relied upon:

1. Pull the file wrapper for US 16/071,122 from Patent Center — confirm the exact granted claim text, the number of claims, the amendment to add plural flow paths/moving mechanism, and the examiner's stated reasons for allowance.
2. Retrieve the full text and figures of US 9,823,190 B2 (esp. FIGS. 1, 3A‑3C) to confirm the element-array orientation relative to the flow direction — this determines whether RION maps onto claim 1's "lengthwise direction of a transversal cross section" or onto claim 5's two-sided arrangement.
3. Verify US 5,861,950's assignee, claim set, and figures for the "beam wider than jet thickness" geometry and its orientation relative to flow.
4. Identify and verify a specific transmitted-light/obscuration + array-detector reference (candidates surfaced but unverified: WO 99/18425 claim 10) and a split-detector/differential reference for claim 5.
5. Check the PTAB for any IPR/PGR against the '313 patent (none found "by search" in earlier sections — not an authoritative negative).

Note on dates: the task line recites a current date of April 26, 2026 while the session header recites 2026‑09‑29. I flag the inconsistency and do not rely on either for any legal-deadline conclusion; nothing in this § 103 analysis turns on it.