Practical issues in scheduling and dispatching in semiconductor wafer fabrication

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A wafer consists of several chips, and a wafer map shows the locations of defective chips on the wafer. The locational pattern of defective chips on the wafer map provides crucial information for improving the semiconductor wafer fabrication process. Recently, automatic defect pattern classification using convolutional neural networks (CNN) has become popular because of its good classification performance. The good performance is guaranteed only when a large amount of well-balanced training and test data is available. However, such data are difficult to obtain in real practice because the training and test data are obtained by manual inspection. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to resolve the small and imbalanced wafer map data issues. Specifically, we first selected wafers showing clear defect patterns and then replicated them by randomly applying horizontal flip, vertical flip, and rotation. In the case study, we obtained real wafer map data from a semiconductor wafer company. By applying the proposed method, a large amount of well-balanced data was obtained. The CNN model for defect classification was fitted to the obtained data, and it showed good classification performance.