US 2002/0178426 A1 · SYSTEM FOR AND METHOD OF EFFICIENT CONTACT PAD IDENTIFICATION

Abstract

The present invention includes a system for and a method of identifying the location of contact pads on interconnect layers of printed circuit boards or metal layers of integrated circuits. The invention groups the conductive surfaces into rectangular areas and applies a mask to the identified rectangular areas by aligning a corner of the mask with the corresponding corner of the rectangular area. Once aligned, the remaining corners of the mask are checked to see whether there is an underlying conductive material present at all corners thereby identifying a suitable location for a contact pad. The invention further includes an alignment of alternate corners of the mask with the corresponding corner of the rectangular area if previous attempts to identify a contact pad were unsuccessful.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A method of identifying a contact pad location comprising the steps of:

apportioning contiguous groups of adjacent pixels containing conductive material of an interconnect layer into rectangular geometric areas of contiguous conductive material;
specifying a size and geometry of a contact pad;
aligning a first corner of a mask corresponding to said contact pad with a corresponding first corner of each of said rectangular areas, and calculating locations of remaining corners of said mask;
determining whether said remaining corners of said mask identify conductive material;
and
identifying contact pad locations when all four corners of said mask contains conductive material.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

System for and method of efficient contact pad identification

Life of this patent

System for and method of efficient contact pad identification

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims20