Rapid root cause analysis and process change validation with design-centric volume diagnostics in production yield enhancement

Identifying systematic failure mechanisms that cause significant yield loss is a primary yield ramp activity. This task is rendered especially difficult for products made with sub-one-hundred nanometer technologies due to the subtle design-process interactions that create transient systematic failure mechanisms. The impact of this difficulty is felt in prolonged ramp cycles and missed market windows for advanced products. A volume diagnostics methodology proposed earlier was seen to resolve this difficulty with highly accurate localization of systematic failures within the design and with an order of magnitude faster time to results compared to traditional approaches. This work presents a few examples of the success of the design-centric volume diagnostics approach in identifying subtle design-process interactions that led to systematic yield loss. It also demonstrates the statistical validation of the process changes introduced to eliminate this yield loss.