Patent ID: 7953689

Claim:
A method of processing data collected for a semiconductor fabrication process, comprising: retrieving a collection of process data specifying one or more tools used to perform a sequence of semiconductor fabrication steps, and specifying which of the one or more tools was used to perform each of the one or more fabrication steps, relative to one or more wafers, and further specifying a yield percentage obtained from each of the one or more wafers; retrieving one or more rules specifying a group of semiconductor fabrication steps to combine in a hybrid dataset; transforming the collection of process data to generate the hybrid dataset, wherein the hybrid dataset specifies a count value representing how many times each of the one or more tools performed any of the fabrication steps, relative to each of the one or more wafers; storing the hybrid dataset for use by a data mining engine; and supplying the hybrid dataset to the data mining engine, wherein the data mining engine is configured to analyze the hybrid dataset to identify which, if any, of the one or more tools used during semiconductor fabrication process had a consistent negative impact on the yield percentage obtained from each of the one or more wafers.