Data mining integrated circuit fails with fail commonalities

We describe ways to use fail data from many failing integrate circuits (ICs) to determine which ICs failed because of similar causes, rather than to determine the cause of each individual failing IC. The purpose of finding clusters of similarly failing ICs is to focus on systematic defects, and to de-emphasize random ones. Once large groups of similarly failing ICs have been identified, a selection of the ICs in each group can be diagnosed using standard diagnostic routines.