Patent ID: 6970759

Claim:
A process for automatic optimal location of a servicing operation on an integrated circuit ( 3 ) comprising a plurality of physical layers forming an electrical circuit having a plurality of electrical functional elements, this servicing operation comprising at least one step, carried out on at least one element of the electrical circuit in a delimited area accessible from the direction of one surface, called the access surface ( 5 ) of the circuit ( 3 ), wherein: this process comprises a step, called the step of retrieving accessible polygons, in which data are calculated, on the basis of, on the one hand, topographic descriptive data identifying polygons in each layer of the circuit ( 3 ), where each polygon is formed from a characteristic material of the circuit ( 3 ), and, on the other hand, data representing the electrical circuit, in order to identify, for at least each element of the electrical circuit on which at least one step of the servicing operation is to be carried out, the different polygons, called the accessible polygons, which define this element in each layer of the circuit ( 3 ), and on which the servicing tools can be positioned and can carry out at least one step of the servicing operation from the access surface ( 5 ), according to at least one accessibility rule, for each step of the servicing operation, different options are determined for the execution of this step, corresponding to each of the different accessible polygons, called possible starting polygons, on which this step can be executed, all the different execution options producing results which are equivalent with respect to the electrical circuit, and a rating is calculated and assigned to each execution option as a function of: the depth of each possible starting polygon of this execution option, represented by the distance separating the layer comprising this polygon from the access surface ( 5 ), and accessibility parameters of each possible starting polygon of this execution option, the optimal execution option to be used for executing each step of the servicing operation is determined automatically, by a numerical optimization calculation using the ratings assigned to the different execution options of each step of the servicing operation.