Kernel-density-based particle defect management for semiconductor manufacturing facilities

Seung Hwan Park, Sehoon Kim, Jun Geol Baek

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    9 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    In a semiconductor manufacturing process, defect cause analysis is a challenging task because the process includes consecutive fabrication phases involving numerous facilities. Recently, in accordance with the shrinking chip pitches, fabrication (FAB) processes require advanced facilities and designs for manufacturing microcircuits. However, the sizes of the particle defects remain constant, in spite of the increasing modernization of the facilities. Consequently, this increases the particle defect ratio. Therefore, this study proposes a particle defect management method for the reduction of the defect ratio. The proposed method provides a kernel-density-based particle map that can overcome the limitations of the conventional method. The method consists of two phases. The first phase is the acquisition of cumulative coordinates of the defect locations on the wafer using the FAB database. Subsequently, this cumulative data is used to generate a particle defect map based on the estimation of kernel density; this map establishes the advanced monitoring statistics. In order to validate this method, we conduct an experiment for comparison with the previous industrial method.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number224
    JournalApplied Sciences (Switzerland)
    Volume8
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018 Feb 1

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (NRF-2016R1A2B4013678). This work was also supported by the BK21 Plus (Big Data in Manufacturing and Logistics Systems, Korea University) and by the Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2018 by the authors.

    Keywords

    • Kernel density estimation
    • Particle defect management
    • Particle map
    • Semiconductor manufacturing process

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Materials Science
    • Instrumentation
    • General Engineering
    • Process Chemistry and Technology
    • Computer Science Applications
    • Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

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