A Deep Convolutional Neural Network-Based Multi-Class Image Classification for Automatic Wafer Map Failure Recognition in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Wafer maps provide engineers with important information about the root causes of failures during the semiconductor manufacturing process. Through the efficient recognition of the wafer map failure pattern type, the semiconductor manufacturing process and its product performance can be improved, as well as reducing the product cost. Therefore, this paper proposes an accurate model for the automatic recognition of wafer map failure types using a deep learning-based convolutional neural network (DCNN). For this experiment, we use WM811K, which is an open-source real-time wafer map dataset containing wafer map images of nine failure classes. Our research contents can be briefly summarized as follows. First, we use random sampling to extract 500 images from each class of the original image dataset. Then we propose a deep convolutional neural network model to generate a multi-class classification model. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of the proposed prediction model and compare it with three other popular machine learning-based models—logistic regression, random forest, and gradient boosted decision trees—and several well-known deep learning models—VGGNet, ResNet, and EfficientNet. Consequently, the comprehensive analysis showed that the performance of the proposed DCNN model outperformed those of other popular machine learning and deep learning-based prediction models.