Early Verification of Prototype Tooling for IC Designs

This paper presents an overview of IC manufacturing of design prototypes. The impact of manufacturing errors on the product development process is discussed. Alternative ways of reducing the impact of these errors are considered. Due to the increasing complexity of today´s designs, manual inspection is no longer effective for early verification of prototype tooling. New, automatic inspection systems, which can verify tooling early in the manufacturing process are described. These die-to-database inspection systems make it possible to verify design tooling in 3-6 days rather than 3-9 weeks.