US 11,988,613 B2
Care area based defect detection
Satyajit Kautkar, Bangalore (IN); Sambit Rout, Bengaluru (IN); Sunil Kiran Esetty, Bengaluru (IN); and Narasimha Murthy Srinivasa Chandan, Bangalore (IN)
Assigned to Applied Materials Israel Ltd., Rehovot (IL)
Filed by Applied Materials Israel Ltd., Rehovot (IL)
Filed on Feb. 14, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/671,517.
Prior Publication US 2023/0258576 A1, Aug. 17, 2023
Int. Cl. G01N 21/95 (2006.01); G06T 7/00 (2017.01); G06T 7/11 (2017.01); G01N 21/88 (2006.01)
CPC G01N 21/9501 (2013.01) [G06T 7/0004 (2013.01); G06T 7/11 (2017.01); G01N 2021/8864 (2013.01); G06T 2207/30148 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A computerized system of assisting defect detection on a semiconductor specimen, the system comprising a processing and memory circuitry (PMC) configured to:
obtain a first map informative of multiple care areas (CAs) to be inspected on a die of the semiconductor specimen;
create a plurality of bounding rectangles (BRs) enclosing the multiple CAs; and
compact the plurality of BRs to a set of compacted rectangles to meet a predefined inspection capacity while attempting to minimize a non-CA area enclosed by the set of compacted rectangles, giving rise to a second map informative of the set of compacted rectangles, wherein the compacting comprises:
constructing an R-tree structure comprising a bottom layer and one or more upper layers, the bottom layer comprising a plurality of leaf nodes representative of the plurality of BRs, each of the one or more upper layers comprising one or more non-leaf nodes, each given non-leaf node representative of a compacted rectangle enclosing one or more rectangles represented by one or more child nodes of the given non-leaf node, and
selecting a set of nodes from the leaf nodes and the non-leaf nodes of the R-tree structure based on the predefined inspection capacity, the set of nodes representative of the set of compacted rectangles;
wherein the second map is usable for filtering a defect map indicative of defect candidate distribution on the die.