| While commercial software provides means for automatically recognizing defects in fabricated IC circuits, up to certain level of quality, some of the large semiconductor vendors are still relying on human vision for reliably identifying IC defects. Furthermore, the commercial software seems incapable of categorizing the defects by the defect type. Hence, these software solutions cannot produce Pareto charts, summarizing the defect number by the defect type, or automatically identify the category, which, if eliminated, would enable the IC vendor to realize the biggest bang for the buck. Imagars has completed development of prototype software capable of automatically detecting defects of certain types, in particular “line” and “circular” defects. The algorithms for detecting the “line” defects are quite efficient, and are well suited for real-time implementation and batch processing. |
“Line” defect detected in a horizontal pattern
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