Abstract: A work-in-progress (WIP) tracking system is used to coordinate a semiconductor supply chain operation. The WIP tracking system receives WIP updates from semiconductor supply chain vendors and generates a WIP tracking report in which the volume of WIP is measured in expected good parts. In one variation, rather than reporting the WIP currently located at each step of a vendor's process, the WIP tracking report reflects the WIP located at various stages of the semiconductor manufacturing process, where the vendor's steps are mapped to a fewer number of stages.

Abstract: A work-in-progress (WIP) tracking system is used to coordinate a semiconductor supply chain. The WIP tracking receives WIP updates from semiconductor supply chain vendors and generates advanced notices based on an analysis of the WIP updates and predetermined rules. The advanced notices are delivered to downstream vendors to reduce semiconductor manufacturing cycle time and unpredictability between different semiconductor manufacturing phases.

Abstract: The present invention is a device to measure the deterministic structure of the variation of the gate critical dimension (CD), so that accurate topological information about CD variation within the optical field is obtained. The present invention also involves determining the most frequent gate configurations (orientation and neighboring features) in a layout of a specific circuit design, and including these most frequent gate configurations in the measurement device. The present invention further includes a method to determine CD maps across the optical field, based on the collection of CD data for specific gate configurations. The CD maps are used in the course of computer-aided design of IC's to improve the accuracy in which circuit performance metrics and yield are estimated. The present invention describes a set of methods in which the CD maps are integrated into the computer-aided design of ICs.