A Voting Ensemble Classifier for Wafer Map Defect Patterns Identification in Semiconductor Manufacturing

A wafer map contains a graphical representation of the locations about defect pattern on the semiconductor wafer, which can provide useful information for quality engineers. Various defect patterns occur due to increasing wafer sizes and decreasing features sizes, which makes it very complex and unreliable process to identify them. In this paper, we propose a voting ensemble classifier with multi-types features to identify wafer map defect patterns in semiconductor manufacturing. Our research contents can be summarized as follows. First, three distinctive features such as density-, geometry-, and radon-based features were extracted from raw wafer images. Then, we applied four machine learning classifiers, namely logistic regression (LR), random forests (RFs), gradient boosting machine (GBM), and artificial neural network (ANN), and trained them using extracted features of original data set. Then their results were combined with a soft voting ensemble (SVE) technique which assigns higher weights to the classifiers with respect to their prediction accuracy. Consequently, we got performance measures with accuracy, precision, recall, ${F}$ -measure, and AUC score of 95.8616%, 96.9326%, 96.9326%, 96.7124%, and 99.9114%, respectively. These results show that the SVE classifier with proposed multi-types features outperformed regular machine learning-based classifiers for wafer maps defect detection.