Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp. Ltd.

Chien-An Lin

Xiaomeng Chen

Shih-Chang Wang

Yung-Cheng Lin

Pei-Chao Su

Chien-Huei Chen

Kuang-Shing Chen

Hung-Yi Chung

Wei-Chen Wu

Chan-Ming Chang

Shih-Yung Chen

Li-Jou Lee

A hot spot defect detecting method and a hot spot defect detecting system are provided. In the method, hot spots are extracted from a design of a semiconductor product to define a hot spot map comprising hot spot groups, wherein local patterns in a same context of the design yielding a same image content are defined as a same hot spot group. During runtime, defect images obtained by an inspection tool performing hot scans on a wafer manufactured with the design are acquired and the hot spot map is aligned to each defect image to locate the hot spot groups. The hot spot defects in each defect image are detected by dynamically mapping the hot spot groups located in each defect image to a plurality of threshold regions and respectively performing automatic thresholding on pixel values of the hot spots of each hot spot group in the corresponding threshold region.

Hot spot defect detecting method and hot spot defect detecting system

Growing community of inventors

Hsinchu, Taiwan

Chien-An Lin