A color vision inspection system for integrated circuit manufacturing

An inspection system is introduced that can measure critical film thicknesses, segment IC images, and detect an entire class of color defects that would be difficult or impossible to detect with typical gray-scale imaging. This inspection is carried out on a unique multiwindow parallel hardware architecture which allows the inspection process to be performed at high speeds. The inspection is based on image understanding techniques and is carried out in a two-stage fashion where defects are first rapidly hypothesized and then verified in detail only within the salient regions of an image, thus eliminating a large amount of irrelevant data. The system has been tested on numerous IC images and shows promising results. >