Design based automatic defect classification at advanced technology nodes: DI: Defect inspection and reduction

As the semiconductor industry continues to advance to smaller and smaller nodes, Defect Review Scanning Electron Microscopy (DR-SEM) and ADC (Automatic Defect Classification) face increasingly difficult challenges. The Defects of Interest (DOI) shrink as the features shrink, leading to imaging difficulty purely based on scale. Also, more complex defect analysis is required for DOI's formed during multiple patterning steps or DOI's created in previous steps. A smart approach to ADC must be adopted which allows for high quality defect classification focused on root cause analysis and yield prediction in short cycle times. In this paper, we present results from novel approach: Design Based ADC (DBA). Here, design information with current DR-SEM and ADC platforms is combined, leading to superior and robust classification.