Design centering in GaAs IC manufacturing

This paper describes a practical method of design centering for microelectronic, circuits fabrication process. Process data are first evaluated for principal components and subsequently modeled using multilayer perceptron networks in a reduced and transformed input space. Perceptron network models are then inverted, and center settings of input variables are computed by using the inverse PCA transformation. The approach allows for maximizing the yield of fabricated GaAs circuits used in aviation electronics systems. Example of yield maximization for MMIC fabrication data is provided to illustrate the proposed technique.