US Patent 8660818 Systemic diagnostics for increasing wafer yield

A method of performing systemic diagnostics for a wafer includes selecting a design for manufacturability (DFM) rule for analysis. For each IC chip on the wafer, two sets of IC features adjacent the rule can be extracted based on the chip's layout design. Upconverted diagnostics can be run to generate computed numbers associated with combination categories for each set. Zonal analysis can be run on the two sets using the computed numbers to derive metrics for the two sets. A report can be generated based on the zonal analysis.