trical Wafer Sorting (EWS) maps. These images are
generated during the wafer testing phase performed
in semiconductor device fabrication. We assumed to
handle binary EWS maps, where white pixels identify
failed dies, while black pixels the good ones. Usually,
yield detractors are identified by specific and charac-
teristic patterns, named anomalies signatures. These
patterns are useful for investigating the root causes
that could be, for instance, related to an equipment
component failure, a drifting process, or an integra-
tion of processes (May and Spanos, 2006). Unfortu-
nately, new anomalies signatures may appear among
the huge amount of EWS maps generated per day.
Hence, it’s unfeasible to define just a finite set of pos-
sible signatures, as this will not represent a real use-
case scenario. For the same reason, we did not gath-
ered a labeled dataset.
In this paper, we presented a new semisupervised
approach for classifying anomalies signatures in EWS
maps, by combining an unsupervised approach using
a Hierarchical clustering algorithm to create the start-
ing Knowledge base, and a supervised one through
a classifier trained leveraging clustering phase. The
knowledge base represents our core knowledge about
the possible anomalies signatures (i.e., the number of
clusters) known until each daily update. We therefore
dynamically proceeded to test our clustering proce-
dure on the incrementing dataset. Indeed, our dataset
can be daily increased, and the classifier is dynami-
cally updated considering possible new created clus-
ters. The workflow of our solution can be resumed in:
daily arrival of EWS maps, clustering of newcomer
images into previously created clusters, possible cre-
ation of new clusters, anomalies signatures classifica-
tion.
We compared several clustering and classifica-
tion techniques. We found that aggregative hierarchi-
cal clustering leveraging Principal Components com-
puted through the Principal Component Analysis can
be a robust clustering method. Then, we trained a
Convolutional Neural Network with ResNet-18 archi-
tecture, reaching performance comparable with other
state-of-the-art technique. We remark that our method
does not rely on any labeled dataset and can be daily
updated, differently by compared literature. Our
dataset is skewed, a common characteristic in real
use-case industrial scenario. Moreover, we proposed
a method that was proved to be rotation invariant.
The goal of this work was to create a tool to make
as automatic as possible the recognition of wafer
anomalies signatures. This is meaningful as upon
classification the industrial system can be able to au-
tomatically choose (or at least suggest) either to dis-
card a wafer or to ship it to the customer. The pro-
posed method can also grant benefits like reduction
of wafer test results review time, or improvement of
processes, yield, quality, and reliability of production
using the information obtained during clustering pro-
cess.
As future works, we are planning to investigate
performance of other CNN architectures. We are also
designing a comparison study with a two-fold pur-
pose: consolidate outcomes shown in this proposal
employing the WM-811K dataset, and exploring the
existence of any correlation with test phases before
the EWS (e.g., relatively to Wafer Defect Maps -
WDM).
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