Utilizing an integrated yield management system to improve the return on investment in IC manufacturing

The authors describe how a yield management system (YMS) could be designed to provide tools to quickly find and fix process and equipment defect problems in 16 Mbit DRAM IC manufacturing. The proposed system design consists of the KLA 2110 wafer inspection system (with sensitivity down to 0.25 mu m for 16 Mbit DRAM manufacturing), optical and SEM (scanning electron microscope) defect review stations, wafer prober stations, reticle inspectors, a dielectric failure detection system, a defect image storage unit, an analysis workstation, and a host computer where work-in-process and yield information is stored.<<ETX>>