Scoring frame

Chips on a wafer before dicing. The scratching frame can be seen between the individual chips, which acts like a grid structure laid over the wafer.

As a scribe line or scribe ( English scribe line ) is in the semiconductor technology , the area between the usable this on a wafer called. When dividing the wafer into individual chips, it serves as a loss area when sawing or scribing .

However, this area does not go unused during manufacture. It is used for accommodating test structures , for example for measuring contact resistance , overlay offset , the critical dimension(CD), the layer thickness, depth profiles, etc. These test structures are usually only required during manufacture. Placement in the scoring frame saves valuable chip area above all. For some modern manufacturing processes in semiconductor technology, however, the information from the Ritz trench is no longer sufficient, for example overlay and CD measurements for system adjustment. You also need information from the area of ​​the actual chip, the so-called in-die area. Therefore, the majority, but by no means all, of the test structures are housed in the Ritz trench.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. Serope Kalpakjian, Steven R. Schmid, Ewald Werner: Material technology . Pearson, 2011, ISBN 978-3-86894-006-0 , pp. 1104 .