Dynamic self-inspection of integrated circuit pattern defects

At various steps of integrated circuit manufacturing, defects need to be inspected to ensure process integrity. Based on the observation that good patterns usually repeat many times while defective patterns are different from others, we here propose an inspection methodology called dynamic self-inspection (DSI). We present a generic and systematic algorithm of DSI based on relative characteristic code space and code vectors. We also present a few specific examples of its implementations, using Euclidian distance between edge traces as relative characteristics.