Inspection flow of yield impacting systematic defects

Yield impacting systematic defects finding is no longer just relied on Design Rule Checking (DRC) provided by designer or Lithography Rule Checking (LRC) provided by post-optical proximity correction (OPC) results. An inspection flow is proposed in this paper, which is combining the inspection KLA tool and Hotspot Pattern Analyzer (HPA) database software to do the systematic defects filtering, sorting, grouping, and classification on the data base after hot scan inspection. 2 nd time high sensitive inspection is done with new care area, which is reduced into one ten-thousandth of original inspection area. Following this inspection flow, we can identify the process window more accuracy.