TY - JOUR
T1 - A virtual metrology system for semiconductor manufacturing
AU - Kang, Pilsung
AU - Lee, Hyoung joo
AU - Cho, Sungzoon
AU - Kim, Dongil
AU - Park, Jinwoo
AU - Park, Chan Kyoo
AU - Doh, Seungyong
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Brain Korea 21 program in 2006–2008 and Engineering Research Institute of SNU.
PY - 2009/12
Y1 - 2009/12
N2 - Nowadays, the semiconductor manufacturing becomes very complex, consisting of hundreds of individual processes. If a faulty wafer is produced in an early stage but detected at the last moment, unnecessary resource consumption is unavoidable. Measuring every wafer's quality after each process can save resources, but it is unrealistic and impractical because additional measuring processes put in between each pair of contiguous processes significantly increase the total production time. Metrology, as is employed for product quality monitoring tool today, covers only a small fraction of sampled wafers. Virtual metrology (VM), on the other hand, enables to predict every wafer's metrology measurements based on production equipment data and preceding metrology results. A well established VM system, therefore, can help improve product quality and reduce production cost and cycle time. In this paper, we develop a VM system for an etching process in semiconductor manufacturing based on various data mining techniques. The experimental results show that our VM system can not only predict the metrology measurement accurately, but also detect possible faulty wafers with a reasonable confidence.
AB - Nowadays, the semiconductor manufacturing becomes very complex, consisting of hundreds of individual processes. If a faulty wafer is produced in an early stage but detected at the last moment, unnecessary resource consumption is unavoidable. Measuring every wafer's quality after each process can save resources, but it is unrealistic and impractical because additional measuring processes put in between each pair of contiguous processes significantly increase the total production time. Metrology, as is employed for product quality monitoring tool today, covers only a small fraction of sampled wafers. Virtual metrology (VM), on the other hand, enables to predict every wafer's metrology measurements based on production equipment data and preceding metrology results. A well established VM system, therefore, can help improve product quality and reduce production cost and cycle time. In this paper, we develop a VM system for an etching process in semiconductor manufacturing based on various data mining techniques. The experimental results show that our VM system can not only predict the metrology measurement accurately, but also detect possible faulty wafers with a reasonable confidence.
KW - Data mining
KW - Dimensionality reduction
KW - Fault detection
KW - Regression
KW - Semiconductor manufacturing
KW - Virtual metrology
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U2 - 10.1016/j.eswa.2009.05.053
DO - 10.1016/j.eswa.2009.05.053
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:69249221367
VL - 36
SP - 12554
EP - 12561
JO - Expert Systems with Applications
JF - Expert Systems with Applications
SN - 0957-4174
IS - 10
ER -