Anchor Semiconductor releases a new design layout analysis product for design based yield enhancement

Anchor Semiconductor, Inc. has officially released a new product NanoScope™ DPE (Design Pattern Explorer) to enrich its existing pattern centric product portfolios. NanoScope™ DPE is a design based yield management and enhancement tool for production usage.

As IC industry moves towards smaller and smaller technology nodes, the design complexity increases drastically. With existing tools/products, it is a great challenge to design a hotspot free IC layout; as a matter of fact, the hard-to-process hotspot patterns will increase due to the increased design complexity. In addition, how to effectively locate, monitor and specially handling those hotspots is equally challenging in IC manufacturing. After working closely with our leading Foundry and IDM partners and beta testing, newly released NanoScope™ DPE is designed to help our customers to meet that challenge.

NanoScope™ DPE is the natural extension of Anchor Semiconductor's existing pattern centric product family, which provides two major capabilities for manufacturing applications—one is whole chip layout partition and pattern signature analysis; and the other is advanced pattern search. The whole chip layout partition and pattern signature analysis/ranking will zero-in to the most process/yield sensitive regions, which serves as effective guides for metrology/inspection strategy. Advanced pattern search, on the other hand, will zero-in on complex 2D hotspot patterns. Those 2D complex patterns have proven or suspected process/yield sensitivity based on data collected in real production.

"Our customers recognize DPE's importance in manufacturing of advanced technology nodes, especially in applications of locating, monitoring and special handling yield sensitive complex hotspot patterns." Anchor Semiconductor's President Dr. Chenmin Hu said, after his recent meetings with our partners. "We will continue to work closely with our customers to enhance design knowledge based yield management."

For detailed product features, please check out NanoScope DPE datasheet in Products page.

If you are interested in NanoScope-DPE, please contact our sales team at sales@anchorsemi.com for further assistance.