Utilizing the Mean Teacher with Supcontrast Loss for Wafer Pattern Recognition
This work addresses automation for engineers in semiconductor manufacturing to reduce costs and improve accuracy, but it is incremental as it combines existing techniques for a specific domain.
The paper tackled wafer pattern recognition in semiconductor manufacturing by integrating the Mean Teacher framework with supervised contrastive learning loss, achieving improvements of 5.46% in accuracy, 6.68% in precision, 5.42% in recall, and 4.53% in F1 score compared to a baseline.
The patterns on wafer maps play a crucial role in helping engineers identify the causes of production issues during semiconductor manufacturing. In order to reduce costs and improve accuracy, automation technology is essential, and recent developments in deep learning have led to impressive results in wafer map pattern recognition. In this context, inspired by the effectiveness of semi-supervised learning and contrastive learning methods, we introduce an innovative approach that integrates the Mean Teacher framework with the supervised contrastive learning loss for enhanced wafer map pattern recognition. Our methodology not only addresses the nuances of wafer patterns but also tackles challenges arising from limited labeled data. To further refine the process, we address data imbalance in the wafer dataset by employing SMOTE and under-sampling techniques. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of our proposed method and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments using real-world dataset WM811K obtained from semiconductor manufacturers. Compared to the baseline method, our method has achieved 5.46%, 6.68%, 5.42%, and 4.53% improvements in Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score, respectively.