Digital Picture Processing
Morphological algorithms for visual analysis of integrated circuits
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
Machine vision in early days: Japan's pioneering contributions
ACCV'07 Proceedings of the 8th Asian conference on Computer vision - Volume Part I
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An automatic wafer pattern inspection system has been developed that can detect defective patterns 6 mu m or larger in multilayered wafer patterns at a speed 30 times faster than that of a human inspector. The false-alarm rate is less than 0.5 occurrences/chip. This performance is achieved mainly by the use of a special comparison method between two adjacent patterns obtained through a single optical setup, and also by the use of digital design pattern data (CAD data). The main functions of the design pattern data are to specify the inspection area, to designate optimum parameters for inspection, and to separate defective portions into different layers, thereby facilitating the classification of the defects. All image processing is performed in one pass by a high-speed pipeline-structured image processor that can analyze an input image signal at a 7 MHz video rate.