Image Synthesis with Single-type Patterns for Mixed-type Pattern Recognition on Wafer Bin Maps

To increase the productivity, it is important to manage yield and reduce defects in the semiconductor industry. One of the efforts is to identify defect patterns and control the cause factors that affects the defects. Many engineers inspect the quality of each chip and check the defect pattern on the wafer bin maps. To get the accurate and consistent classification results regardless of the level for domain knowledge or experience of engineers, deep learning-based models have recently been studied. Since most previous studies aim to classify the single-type defect patterns, it is needed to consider the mixed-type defect patterns together. Also, they require a lot of labeled data to train the deep learning-based classification model. However, defects occur extremely rarely in actual manufacturing process. Therefore, the method securing the higher accuracy in a situation where enough labeled data are not given is needed. This paper proposes a deep convolutional generative adversarial network for wafer map synthesis (DCGAN-WS) which generates the mixed-type patterns by synthesizing the single-type pattern and adding the pixel-wise summation. To maintain the characteristics of the binary pixel of the wafer bin maps, a thresholding technique is added. MixedWM38 dataset is used for the experiments, and it was verified that the mixed-type patterns were synthesized well. It helps to construct more robust model for single-type pattern classification and to generate the mixed-type patterns that have not occurred before. In the future, it is expected that this model addresses the problem of the lack of labeled data for defect pattern classification models.