Abstract: A system is disclosed for displaying circuitry interconnections as flightlines between a component specified as the local component and the foreign components connecting to the local component. Upon obtaining data of the circuit components and interconnections, a user can designate the local component from among all of the circuit components. The system determines the foreign components connected to that local component, retrieves the flightline appearance display settings for the computer display, and renders a view of the specified local component and its foreign components with flightlines representing each interconnection connection. The flightlines can be color coded to indicate inputs, outputs or other characteristics of interest to the user.

Abstract: Methods and systems are provided to reduce the complexity of sequential digital circuitry including cells of unknown function by grouping and defining like instance of combinational circuitry cells. The system groups together cells that feed into the same combination of one or more state cells. The groups of cells are then replaced by clouds which are defined in the netlist for the sequential digital circuitry to produce a simpler representation of the circuitry for analysis purposes and to aid in determining the function of those cells for which the function is unknown.

Abstract: A design analysis workstation for performing design analysis of integrated circuits provides facilities for extracting design and layout information from digital image-mosaics captured during deconstruction of an integrated circuit. The design analysis workstation enables propagation of signal information from an annotation object having a signal property to at least one connected annotation object in order to point to errors in the design analysis.

Abstract: Integrated circuit dies are prepared for imaging by completely etching away all metal from the metal lines without removing barrier layers that underlie the metal lines. The metal vias may also be removed, especially if they are formed from the same metal as the metal lines, as in copper damascene circuits. This provides high contrast images that permits circuit layout extraction software to readily distinguish between metal lines and vias.

Abstract: Integrated circuit dies are prepared for imaging by completely etching away all metal from the metal lines without removing barrier layers that underlie the metal lines. The metal vias may also be removed, especially if they are formed from the same metal as the metal lines, as in copper damascene circuits. This provides high contrast images that permits circuit layout extraction software to readily distinguish between metal lines and vias.

Abstract: A system and method for aligning tile images of an area of interest of an integrated circuit having N metal layers M, where N>1, includes a parametric representation algorithm for extracting parametric representations of edges from an image showing metal layer (MN) and at least a proportion of metal layer (MN?1) of the integrated circuit to produce a parametric representation of the edges visible on the respective metal layers. The parametric representations include an indication of the metal layer with which each extracted edge is associated and at least one of x and y coordinates associated with each of the extracted edges.

Abstract: A three-dimensional model of a semiconductor chip is produced from coarsely aligned mosaic images of respective layers of the semiconductor chip using an improved method for aligning the mosaic images, so that minimal operator intervention is required to produce the model. A line detection algorithm is applied to each of the mosaic images to produce a set of line segments identified by x and y coordinates of end points of the line segments with respect to a frame defined by a mosaic image in which each line segment occurs. Virtual reference marks are established using end points of different mosaic images that are vertically aligned to within an uncertainty of the coarse alignment of the mosaic images, and the virtual reference marks are used to compute a mean adjustment of the x and y coordinates of each of the mosaic images to produce a three dimensional coordinate space.