An Elegantly Simple Approach for Wafer Feature Extraction and Defect Pattern Recognition

Identifying defect patterns in a wafer map during manufacturing is crucial to find the root cause of the underlying issue and provides valuable insights on improving yield in the foundry. Currently used methods use deep neural networks(DNN’s) to identify the defects. These DNN’s are generally very huge and have significant inference time. They also require GPU support to efficiently operate. All these issues make these models not fit for on-line prediction in the manufacturing foundry. In this paper, we propose an extremely simple yet effective technique to extract features from wafer images. The proposed method is extremely fast, intuitive, and non-parametric while being explainable. The experiment results show that the proposed pipeline outperforms conventional deep learning models on the tested dataset. Our feature extraction requires no training or fine-tuning while preserving the relative shape and location of data points as revealed by our interpretability analysis.