Automated vision system for inspection of IC pads and bonds

One of the problems in increasing reliability in the manufacture of integrated circuit (IC) devices is inspection of the bond pads and the bonds connecting the bond pads to the lead fingers of the device. The continuing increase in packing density of VLSI circuits requires that the inspection process be completely automated. The authors present methods for visual inspection of bond pads and bonds, which are intended to automatically extract parameters of significance in determining their quality, from two-dimensional images taken from the top of the IC wafer.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>