Cross-chamber Data Transferability Evaluation for Fault Detection and Classification in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Unit-to-unit variation among the production chambers is a long-lasting challenge for Fault Detection and Classification (FDC) development in the semiconductor industry. Currently, various methods are applied for knowledge transfer among chambers and generalized FDC model development. However, the existing methods cannot give a quantitative or qualitative measure for cross-chamber data transferability evaluation. This research proposes a novel methodology for data transferability evaluation and important sensor screening, which can serve as a data quality evaluation tool for any FDC model. In this research, firstly, Time Series Alignment Kernel (TSAK) is incorporated into Multidomain Discriminant Analysis (MDA) algorithm to achieve sensor-based domain generalization. Then, domain-invariant features are directly extracted for sensor visualization. After that, Fisher’s criterion ratios of the labeled good wafer samples and defective ones are computed based on the domain-invariant features of each sensor to quantitatively estimate how easy it is to transfer knowledge of each sensor among chambers, i.e., data transferability evaluation. Lastly, the proposed method develops a Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE)-based sensor selection algorithm to qualitatively analyze the importance of each sensor channel and identify the critical sensor subset. In this study, validation of the proposed method is based on two open-source datasets from real production lines.