It is frequently very useful to have a standardized method for labeling elements in an array on a silicon wafer surface.

This Guide defines an element addressing convention for locating and uniquely identifying rectangular elements in a Cartesian array.

Such arrays are useful in locating sites for site flatness characterization, defect mapping, determination of parametric distributions, etc. on unpatterned semiconductor wafers.

This Guide covers procedures for assigning addresses that can be used to locate and identify rectangular elements in a Cartesian array. The array may be regular or tiled in one direction.

Relating the position of the array to the wafer surface is outside the scope of this Guide, but it may be established through use of the wafer coordinate system defined in SEMI M20.

This Guide covers procedures for assigning a unique identification (address) for each element in the array. An example of the results obtained by following this procedure are given in Related Information 1.

The element addressing convention in this Guide provides an orderly progression along perpendicular directions with addresses of adjacent elements in any direction differing by one. Consequently, distances may be calculated in a unified way.

For complex patterns, more than one array on a wafer may be defined and related to the same coordinate axes.

Referenced SEMI Standards (purchase separately)

SEMI M17 — Guide for a Universal Wafer Grid

SEMI M20 — Practice for Establishing a Wafer Coordinate System

SEMI M59 — Terminology of Silicon Technology

Revision History

SEMI M21-0318 (Reapproved 0923)

SEMI M21-0318 (technical revision)

SEMI M21-1110 (technical revision)

SEMI M21-0304 (technical revision)

SEMI M21-0998 (technical revision)

SEMI M21-92 (first published)