Care Area Wizard

The Care Area Wizard (CAW) is a Qckvu3 plug-in application that enables a yield engineer to quickly define regions of interest (care areas) on a chip layout. The resulting collection of "Care Areas" are passed to a KLA-Tencor Wafer inspection machine.

The basis for selecting these care areas depends on selecting cell outlines and filtering the selection by the cell's position in either a particular window or by the cell's parent or location in the database hierarchy.

Once a set of Care Areas has been defined, the program can resize them if necessary and can merge touching or closely spaced regions.

Output consists of a GDSII file populated with Care Area rectangles, along with a mapping.csv file and a config.csv file and two bitmapped images of registration sites.

The CA Wizard is available on 64 bit Linux OS.

Qckvu3 displaying just the cell placement outlines

Application Notes

Paring Down Large Files - large GDSII files can be "pared" down by filtering (during loading) both unneeded cells and layers.

Defining the Registration Sites - describes how to select the two polygons that will be used as registration sites.

Automated SRAM ID - describes the new SRAM_ID functionality that can find and create care areas for all SRAMs on a chip with a single click ...

LMHOSTID Problems - describes what to do when lmhostid returns null instead of the expected hostid ...

Rules Control in Expert Mode - Describes how to set the rules in SRAM Finder and RPF in Expert Mode.

Log Files - describes where to find them, options and what they contain.

Using Cell Name Search - Explains what to do when you must use a cell name search to generate SRAM care areas; in particular when you have 200,000,000 cells to be extracted and merged.