Scan Diagnosis and Its Successful Industrial Applications

As technologies move below 130nm, the IC industry has seen a significant change in defect type encountered. Feature-related defects are becoming more prevalent than particle-driven defects in nanometer designs. The process and design variances require checks for the design-for-manufacturing (DFM) issues in order to achieve a high yield. Scan diagnosis targeted for the nanometer designs can provide quick, accurate and reliable failure information from the production environment. The ranked, fault classified and physically linked scan diagnosis results can, in turn, provide the guides for DFM checks. High volume diagnosis provides data to yield management system for statistical analysis. This presentation briefly explains the technology behind the scene, discusses scan diagnosis applications and shows the results.