Method and system for integrated circuit backside navigation
AssigneeCredence Systems Corporation
InventorsMark Alan Thompson, Erwan Le Roy, Theodore Lundquist, William B. Thompson, Catherine Kardach
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Abstract
The backside navigation method of the present invention includes milling a fiducial opening through the substrate of an integrated circuit. The milling process is stopped when the fiducial opening reaches the bottom of a trench isolation structure. The trench isolation structure delineated by the fiducial opening may be imaged and registered to a computer aided design layout image to achieve sub-micron navigation resolution.
Claims21
A method of backside navigation comprising:
- milling a fine fiducial opening through a substrate with a charged particle beam;
- and endpointing said fine fiducial opening upon delineating a trench isolation structure to create a registration marker to register an image of said trench isolation structure to a reference image.
A method of backside navigation comprising:
- forming a fiducial opening, wherein a portion of a trench isolation structure is delineated;
- acquiring an image of said delineated portion of said trench isolation structure;
- registering said acquired image and a reference image;
- and
- generating position control information as a function of said registered acquired image and said reference image.
A method of forming a backside marker in an integrated circuit comprising:
- forming a coarse fiducial opening;
- forming a fine fiducial opening in said coarse fiducial opening, wherein said fine fiducial opening delineates a portion of a trench isolation structure.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.