Hunting For Macro Defects


Detecting macro-defects early in the wafer processing flow is vital for yield and process improvement, and it is driving innovations in both inspection techniques and wafer test map analysis. At the wafer level, a macro-defect can affect more than one die, and in some cases large regions of a wafer. Finding macro defects can indicate a significant issue with a process module, a particular fi... » read more

Better Inspection, Higher Yield


Wafers can be inspected for large, obvious defects, or for small, subtle ones. The former is referred to as macro-inspection, while the latter is micro-inspection. These processes use different machines with different capital and operating costs, and they might look like competing approaches with different economic returns. In fact, they are complementary tactics that can be balanced within an ... » read more