Kla Tencor Corporation

Kla-tencor Technologies Corporation

Arkady Simkin

Boris Efraty

Itai Bransky

Yaron Ish-Shalom

Nassim Bishara

Shachor Omer

Igor Baskin

Notch detection methods and modules are provided for efficiently estimating a position of a wafer notch. Capturing an image of specified region(s) of the wafer, a principle angle is identified in a transformation, converted into polar coordinates, of the captured image. Then the wafer axes are recovered from the identified principle angle as the dominant orientations of geometric primitives in the captured region. The captured region may be selected to include the center of the wafer and/or certain patterns that enhance the identification and recovering of the axes. Multiple images and/or regions may be used to optimize image quality and detection efficiency.

Wafer notch detection

Automated comparison of tool recipes is described. A target recipe is digitally translated from a tool language to a standard language format to produce a translated recipe. The translated recipe is digitally compared to a source recipe that is also in the standard language format.

Automatic recipe validation

Growing community of inventors

Yokneam Ilit, Israel

Arkady Simkin