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Watchdog system having data differentiating means for use in monitoring of semiconductor wafer testing line

  • US 5,726,920 A
  • Filed: 09/29/1995
  • Issued: 03/10/1998
  • Est. Priority Date: 09/29/1995
  • Status: Expired due to Term
First Claim
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1. A machine-implemented watchdog system for monitoring the operations of one or more units of final wafer sort (FWS) test equipment, where each unit of FWS test equipment participates as part of one or more FWS test stations in FWS testing of plural dice provided on each of a supplied plurality of wafers from a given production lot of wafers, said FWS testing being for verifying high-level functionality of the tested dice, wherein each FWS test station outputs for each wafer tested by said test station, a corresponding block of raw result data indicative of which dice tested as functional or not, said system comprising:

  • (a) receiving means for receiving respective blocks of raw result data from each respective test station, each received block of raw result data indicating FWS test results obtained by the respective test station for a respectively tested wafer;

    (b) differentiating means for adding to each received block of raw result data, additional information signals, said additional information signals enabling the sorting of the blocks of raw result data according to one or more predefined sorting criteria, the combination of each block of raw result data and the correspondingly added additional information signals defining differentiable result data; and

    (c) storing means for storing the differentiable result data.

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