Process diagnosis via electrical-wafer-sorting maps classification

The commonality analysis is a proven tool for fault detection in semiconductor manufacturing. This methodology extracts subsets of production lots from all the available data. Then, data mining techniques are used only on the selected data. This approach loses part of the available information and does not discriminate among the lots. The new methodology performance the automatic classification of the electrical wafer test maps in order to identify the classes of failure present in the production lots. Subsequently, the proposed procedure uses the process history of each wafer to create a list of the root cause candidates. This methodology is the core of the software tool ACID which is currently used for process diagnosis at the Agrate site of the ST Microelectronics. A real analysis is presented.