Fault Detection and Diagnosis Using Self-Attentive Convolutional Neural Networks for Variable-Length Sensor Data in Semiconductor Manufacturing

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Nowadays, more attention has been placed on cost reductions and yield enhancement in the semiconductor industry. During the manufacturing process, a considerable amount of sensor data called status variables identification (SVID) is collected by sensors embedded in advanced machines. This data is a valuable source for data-driven automatic fault detection and diagnosis at an early manufacturing stage to maintain competitive advantages. However, wafer processing times vary slightly from wafer to wafer, resulting in variable-length signal data. The conventional approaches use much condensed data called fault detection and classification (FDC) data made by manually designed feature extraction. Or, recent deep learning approaches assume that all wafers have the same processing time, which is impotent to the variable-length SVID. To detect and diagnose faults directly from the variable-length SVID, we propose a self-attentive convolutional neural network. In experiments using real-world data from a semiconductor manufacturer, the proposed model outperformed other deep learning models with less training time and showed robustness at different sequence lengths. Compared to FDC data, SVID data showed better fault detection performance. Without manually investigating the lengthy sensor signals, abnormal sensor value patterns were found at the time specified by the model.