Reticle Analysis - Help rectify your yield

Reticle-induced contamination, derived from the photolithographic masks in wafer fabrication and replicated across a wafer, can have a significant negative effect on yield in semiconductor manufacturing. Contamination on a reticle during manufacturing can be disastrous, because a defective reticle can create a defect in every single die generated by the reticle and replicated across the wafer.

A first class yield management tool should allow the user to stack reticles for analysis of such behaviour. Bin and parametric behaviour should be analyzable across a reticle.

In yieldHUB, one product expert in your company can set the reticle and all other users can analyse using that stored reticle. Some products will have assembly reticles so multiple reticles per product are not unusual and are supported.

Here is an example of a wafer (we are just showing an extract from the wafermap) with an obvious reticle issue (some are not obvious from just one wafer) .

For statistical significance, the more wafers analysed together the better. In yieldHUB hundreds of wafers, sometimes equivalent to many gigabytes of raw data, can be analysed for reticle-induced defects in seconds, even on a smart phone.

The online sharing of such analysis between fabless company and foundry (or vice versa) are instantaneous with yieldHUB. Accelerated review of this yield hazard is critical as dimensions reduce in semiconductor wafer foundries.