Automatic Error Detection in Integrated Circuits Image Segmentation: A Data-driven Approach
This addresses the bottleneck of requiring human experts for visual inspection in large-scale industrial IC segmentation applications, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic error detection in integrated circuit image segmentation by presenting a data-driven approach that achieves recall/precision of 0.92/0.93 for wire errors and 0.96/0.90 for via errors on a real industry dataset.
Due to the complicated nanoscale structures of current integrated circuits(IC) builds and low error tolerance of IC image segmentation tasks, most existing automated IC image segmentation approaches require human experts for visual inspection to ensure correctness, which is one of the major bottlenecks in large-scale industrial applications. In this paper, we present the first data-driven automatic error detection approach targeting two types of IC segmentation errors: wire errors and via errors. On an IC image dataset collected from real industry, we demonstrate that, by adapting existing CNN-based approaches of image classification and image translation with additional pre-processing and post-processing techniques, we are able to achieve recall/precision of 0.92/0.93 in wire error detection and 0.96/0.90 in via error detection, respectively.