Evaluation of Mask Manufacturing Efficiency Using Mask Data Rank Information

The photomask cost is becoming one of the challenging issues in the semiconductor industry, as the cost of photomasks has been rising year by year. ASET started Mask D2I (Mask Design, Drawing and Inspection Technology) project with the sponsorship from the NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) in 2006 for the purpose of the mask cost reduction. In earlier papers[1-5], we introduced the idea of photomask data prioritization method which is referred to as Mask Data Rank (MDR). We have built our software system to convert Design Intent (DI) to MDR with cooperation of STARC. Then we showed the results of experiments with mask data provided by semiconductor companies. In this paper we show the additional report of mask inspection experiments using real photomasks. Then we show the evaluation results about mask drawing time reduction using MDR flow. Finally we introduce detailed algorithm to extract design intent from analog circuits.