by Ed Korczynski, Senior Technical Editor
Inspecting nanometer-scale ICs during fabrication is not easy, and knowing what it is that you’ve found is even more difficult. KLA-Tencor, long the industry’s top inspection company, has now released a defect-review scanning electron microscope (DR-SEM) to drive down the time to create defect Paretos in volume production — leading to both faster excursion correction and more learning for greater yield. And the quiet acquisition of a software firm might have something to do with all of this.