Patent ID: 7488668

Claim:
A manufacturing method for semiconductor devices, which is a method for determining an arrangement of a plurality of unit-device-formation-regions that are rectangular regions for forming the semiconductor devices in a device-formation-effective-region on a semiconductor wafer and manufacturing the semiconductor devices based on the determined arrangement, the method comprising: forming a plurality of parallel-line-partition-regions partitioned by an outer periphery of the device-formation-effective-region on the wafer and a plurality of parallel lines, by disposing the respective parallel lines in the device-formation-effective-region on the wafer with use of a length-dimension of a second-line-segment out of a first-line-segment and the second-line-segment which constitute the unit-device-formation-region and are orthogonal to each other as an arrangement interval, through execution of computer processing; forming one or a plurality of the unit-device-formation-regions partitioned by the respective parallel lines and a plurality of the second-line-segments in the parallel-line-partition-regions, by disposing the respective second-line-segments in a direction orthogonal to the parallel lines in the respective parallel-line-partition-regions with use of a length-dimension of the first-line-segment as an arrangement interval, through execution of computer processing; determining an arrangement of the unit-device-formation-regions which maximizes each number of the unit-device-formation-regions formed in each of the respective parallel-line-partition-regions independently of other parallel-line-partition-regions as an arrangement of the respective unit-device-formation-regions in the entire device-formation-effective-region on the wafer, through execution of computer processing, and thereby preparing the determined arrangement as an arrangement information for the unit-device-formation-regions; forming the respective semiconductor devices on the semiconductor wafer based on the prepared arrangement information; and performing a plasma etching process to the semiconductor wafer with a mask disposed thereon from a masked surface to divide the semiconductor wafer into the respective semiconductor devices in accordance with the arrangement information, and thereby the respective divided semiconductor devices are manufactured.