A golden-template self-generating method for patterned wafer inspection

This paper presents a novel golden-template self-generating technique for detecting possible defects in periodic two-dimensional wafer images. A golden template of the patterned wafer image under inspection can be obtained from the wafer image itself and no other prior knowledge is needed. It is a bridge between the existing self-reference methods and image-to-image reference methods. Spectral estimation is used in the first step to derive the periods of repeating patterns in both di r ections. Then a building block representing the structure of the patterns is extracted using interpolation to obtain sub-pixel resolution. After that, a new defect-free golden template is built based on the extracted building block. Finally, a pixel-to-pixel comparison is all we need to find possible defects. A comparison between the results of the proposed method and those of the previously published methods is presented.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260; e-mail: eleguans@nus.edu.sg, , , , , , SG

   Pin Xie & Sheng-Uei Guan

Received: 19 May 1999 / Accepted: 20 May 2000

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