Chip arrangement determining apparatus and method

Abstract

The invention provides a chip arrangement determining method for acquiring a group of chips as non-defective products from a substantially circular wafer. Plural pairs of grid points, having a space smaller than a diameter of a regional circle which is indicative of the size of a valid exposure area, are extracted from chip arrays arranged in a grid pattern. With respect to each of the plural pairs of grid points extracted, a regional circle having the pair of grid points on its circumference is formed on the chip arrays. Then, the number of chips entirely included within the regional circle is counted. A regional circle, having the maximum number of chips entirely included within the circle, is specified from all the regional circles formed, and this chip arrangement is determined as the optimum chip arrangement. In this manner, a strictly optimum semiconductor chip arrangement on a wafer can be obtained in a short time.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.