Deep Learning Joins Process Control Arsenal Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design Community

At the 2017 Advanced Process Control (APC 2017) conference, several companies presented implementations of deep learning to find transistor defects, align lithography steps, and apply predictive maintenance. The application of neural networks to semiconductor manufacturing was a much-discussed trend at the 2017 APC meeting in Austin, starting out with a keynote speech by Howard Witham, Texas operations manager for Qorvo Inc. Witham said artificial intelligence has brought human beings to "a point in history, for our industry and the world in general, that is more revolutionary than a small, evolutionary step." People in the semiconductor industry "need to take what's out there and figure out how to apply it to your own problems, to figure out where does the machine win, and where does the brain still win?" At Seagate Technology, a small team of engineers stitched together largely packaged or open source software running on a conventional CPU to create a convolution neural network (CNN)-based tool to find low-level device defects. In an APC paper entitled Automated Wafer Image Review using Deep Learning, Sharath Kumar Dhamodaran, an engineer/data scientist based at Seagate's Bloomington, Minn.