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Shape prior guided defect pattern classification and segmentation in wafer bin maps

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Abstract

In semiconductor manufacturing, patterns formed by defective dies in a wafer bin map (WBM) reveal possible problems during the wafer fabrication process. Therefore, the identification of these patterns is important for root cause diagnosis and yield enhancement. Recently, as the manufacturing process becomes increasingly complicated, mixed-type defect patterns have been frequently observed on the WBMs. The joint classification and segmentation of each pattern contained in the mixed-type pattern is challenging, especially when these patterns are connected or overlapped. This study proposes a shape prior guided method in which the shape templates are deformed to match the patterns with a spatial transformer network. The deformation based method is able to give plausible results while reducing computation cost of the network. Furthermore, the method is flexible and easily extended to deal with complex shapes by defining different shape templates. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the identification of the pattern types, as well as the separation of each isolated pattern.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Funding

The study is supported by Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72334004), General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71971143), Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72101065, No. 72101106), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (No. 2021A1515110336), Guangdong Provincial Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project (No. GD22CGL35), Special Projects in Key Fields of Ordinary Colleges and Universities in Guangdong Province (No. 2022ZDZX2054), University Innovation Team Project of Guangdong Province (No. 2021WCXTD002), and Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (No. RCBS20210609103119020, No. RCBS20221008093124063).

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All authors contributed to the idea of the study. The first draft of the manuscript was written by RW and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ben Niu.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Wang, R., Wang, S. & Niu, B. Shape prior guided defect pattern classification and segmentation in wafer bin maps. J Intell Manuf 36, 319–330 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-023-02242-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-023-02242-w

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