Patent ID: 7676775

Claim:
A method for determining root causes of fail patterns in integrated circuit chips, the method comprising: identifying, by using a computer, a plurality of potential defects that can occur in a given integrated circuit chip layout from a schematic used in the manufacture of the integrated circuit chip; identifying, by using the computer, a plurality of potential fail patterns in the given integrated circuit chip layout, the potential fail patterns comprising functional manifestations of defects in the integrated circuit chip; identifying, by using the computer, correlations between the identified potential defects and identified potential fail patterns that are root causes of the identified potential fail patterns; using the identified correlations to identify groupings of potential fail patterns and potential defects, each grouping comprising one potential defect and one or more potential fail patterns; and using the groupings of potential fail patterns and potential defects to identify actual defects in a production integrated circuit chip by: placing the production integrated circuit chip in a tester configured to analyze operation of the production integrated circuit chip; using the tester to identify actual fail patterns in the production integrated circuit chip; correlating the actual fail patterns to the potential fail patterns; and using the identified groupings of potential fail patterns and potential defects to identify actual defects in the production integrated circuit chip, wherein the step of using the grouping of potential fail patterns and potential defects to identify actual defects further comprises: grouping the actual fail patterns according to spatial correlations across the integrated circuit chip; matching the groupings of actual fail patterns to the groupings of potential fail patterns and potential defects; and identifying potential defects associated with the groupings of potential fail patterns and potential defects to which the groupings of actual fail patterns are matched.