Spatial monitoring of wafer map defect data based on 2D wavelet spectrum analysis

Abstract

Since machine vision systems (MVS) lead to a wide usage of monitoring systems for industrial applications, the research on the statistical process control (SPC) of image data has been promoted as an automated method for early detection and prevention of unusual conditions in manufacturing processes. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric SPC approach based on the 2D wavelet spectrum (WS-SPC) to extract the feature that contains the spatial and directional information of each subspace in an image. Using the 2D discrete wavelet transform and spectrum analysis, the representative statistic, the Hurst index, is calculated, and a single matrix space that consists of estimated statistics is reconstructed into a spatial control area for SPC. When a control limit is determined by the density of statistics, real-time monitoring based on WS-SPC is available for time releasing images. In the application, an analysis of wafer bin maps (WBMs) is conducted at a semiconductor company in Korea in order to evaluate the performance of the suggested approach. The results show that the proposed method is effective in terms of its fast computation speed and spectral monitoring.