Patent ID: 6885955

Claim:
A method of analyzing the yield characteristics of a semiconductor process performed on one or more semiconductor wafers on each of which are formed one or more semiconductor die, comprising the steps of: selecting, based on one or more characteristics of the one or more wafers, one or more regions of the one or more wafers from which to use wafer-level parametric data regarding a wafer-level parameter and die-level parametric data regarding a die-level parameter to ascertain information regarding the relationship between the wafer-level parameter and the die-level parameter, the one or more regions comprising less than all of the one or more wafers, wherein the step of selecting comprises the step of selecting one or more regions of the one or more wafers based on wafer sort data produced by one or more wafer sort tests performed on the one or more wafers, wherein the step of selecting based on wafer sort data comprises the steps of: selecting a specified number of wafer regions that performed the worst on one or more wafer sort tests; and selecting the specified number of wafer regions that performed the best on one or more wafer sort tests; identifying wafer-level parametric data from the one or more regions; identifying die-level parametric data from the one or more regions that correspond to the water-level parametric data; and evaluating the wafer-level parametric data and the die-level parametric data to ascertain information regarding the relationship between the wafer-level parameter and the die-level parameter.