An information retrieval system for the analysis of systematic defects in VLSI

This work presents a novel information retrieval (IR) tool, designed to help VLSI defect and yield engineers identify potentially defective layout regions. Given a query defect pattern discovered in a manufacturing process, this tool can be used to return similar layout regions in one or more designs ranked by similarity to the query pattern. Defect engineers can then examine these regions in hardware for presence of defects to analyze the cause of the failure. Detailed design considerations, such as feature extraction and clustered search, as well as some real-world search results, are presented and discussed.