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Expert Systems
with Applications
Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958
www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

An unsupervised neural network approach for automatic

semiconductor wafer defect inspection
Chuan-Yu Chang a,*, ChunHsi Li b, Jia-Wei Chang a, MuDer Jeng b
a
Department of Electronic Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Yunlin 640, Taiwan, ROC
b
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan, ROC

Abstract

Semiconductor wafer defect inspection is an important process before die packaging. The defective regions are usually identified
through visual judgment with the aid of a scanning electron microscope. Dozens of people visually check wafers and hand-mark their
defective regions. Consequently, potential misjudgment may be introduced due to human fatigue. In addition, the process can incur sig-
nificant personnel costs. Prior work has proposed automated visual wafer defect inspection that is based on supervised neural networks.
Since it requires learned patterns specific to each application, its disadvantage is the lack of product flexibility. Self-organizing neural
networks (SONNs) have been proven to have the capabilities of unsupervised auto-clustering. In this paper, an automatic wafer inspec-
tion system based on a self-organizing neural network is proposed. Based on real-world data, experimental results show, with good per-
formance, that the proposed method successfully identifies the defective regions on wafers.
Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Wafer inspection; Self-organizing neural network; Unsupervised learning

1. Introduction duced due to human fatigue. In addition, the process can

Recently, the complexity of integrated circuits (ICs) has
increased drastically. A good yield ratio is a significant fac-
tor for semiconductor fabrication. Therefore, wafer defect
inspection is an important process before die packaging.
The objective of the wafer defect inspection is to identify
defective dies and discard them. The inspection methods
can be roughly categorized into two types: electric inspec-
tion and visual inspection. Electric inspection requires
additional wafer space for testing circuits resulting in an
increase of unit cost. On the other hand, the visual inspec-
tion method identifies the defective regions through visual
judgment with the aid of a scanning electron microscope.
With this method 5–10 people visually check wafers and
hand-mark their defective regions (Su, Yang, & Ke,
2002). By this means, potential misjudgment may be intro-
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 5 5342601x4337; fax: +886 5
5312170.
E-mail address: chuanyu@yuntech.edu.tw (C.-Y. Chang).
incur significant personnel costs.
There have been several methods developed for wafer
inspection (Huang, Wu, & Wan, 2002; Mital & Teoh,
1991; Su et al., 2002; Tobin, Karnowski, & Lakhani,
2001; Zang, Lin, & Wang, 1999). Tobin et al. (2001) inte-
grated image processing techniques and database systems
for wafer defect inspection. This method compares the
images of the tested dies with those of the good dies to
identify the defective dies. However, this method requires
the creation of various templates for different circuits and
die images for further processing, and thus loses flexibility.
Furthermore, incorrect templates may result in incorrect
inspection results. Mital and Teoh (1991) proposed an
automatic wafer pattern inspection system. The inspection
system was based on a knowledge database which governs
the geometry and features of the various regions of the
wafer images. This implies that a lot of patterns should
be collected.
Zang et al. (1999) developed an automatic visual inspec-
tion system using computer vision techniques. Applications

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.10.033
 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958
Fig. 1. The conceptual diagram of the automatic semiconductor wafer inspection system.
of this approach are limited to boundary defect problems
such as die cracks. In addition, the inspection time of
Zang’s approach was about 30 min per wafer. Su et al.
(2002) proposed a neural network approach for semicon-
ductor wafer visual inspection. Three neural learning meth-
ods, including backpropagation (BP), radial basis function
(RBF), and learning vector quantization (LVQ) networks,
were proposed and tested. However, all these neural net-
works are based on supervised-learning. That is, to use
these neural networks, we require learned patterns, e.g. spe-
cific defect patterns, predetermined regions, and die bound-
aries. Consequently, the product flexibility is low.
Meanwhile, to achieve an efficient inspection, a minor bor-
der cut and complex orientation adjusting processes were
applied. These processes are quite complex and time
consuming.
The self-organizing neural network (SONN) is an unsu-
pervised clustering network with a competitive learning
capability and SONNs have been proven to have the capa-
bility of auto-clustering (Ham & Kostanic, 2001; Haykin,
1999). Wang, Krishnan, Kugean, and Tjoa (2001) pro-
posed a self-organizing neural network method for the clas-
sification of endoscopic images.
Therefore, to remove the limitations caused by super-
vised neural networks, a self-organizing neural network-
based automatic wafer defect inspection system (AWDIS)
is proposed in this paper. Based on color variance and
sharp irregularity, the AWDIS classifies the wafer images
into four classes. Finally, a heuristic defect detection algo-
rithm is applied to determine which class contains defective
regions. It is noted that the proposed AWDIS is zoomed-
independent, case-independent and orientation-indepen-
dent, i.e. the proposed AWDIS is a high-level inspection
system. The inspection does not require the zoom parame-
ters and patterns of the good dies. In addition, the pro-
posed AWDIS does not need to adjust image positions
951
and correct circuit templates. Experimental results show
the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed AWDIS.
Fig. 1 shows the conceptual diagram of the automatic
semiconductor wafer inspection system, which consists of
several pieces of equipment including an SEM, a conveyor,
a dicing saw, and a die picker. The operation process is
described as follows: The wafer was cut into dies by the dic-
ing saw and then repositioned on a thin-film as a testing
wafer. The conveyor transfers testing wafers for inspection.
A die image is acquired from the SEM and quantized into a
full-color image. The die image is then inspected by the
proposed AWDIS. A wafer map file is created to record
the inspection result. This process continues until all dies
are inspected. After the inspection process, the die picker
selects the good dies and discards the defected dies from
the testing wafer, according to the wafer map. The good
dies are placed in a chip tray for the packaging process.
Then another wafer is fed in, and a new inspection cycle
commences.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2, the overall algorithm of the automatic wafer
inspection system is presented. Section 3 discusses the
experimental results. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Sec-
tion 4.
2. Automatic wafer defect inspection system (AWDIS)
Fig. 2 shows the overall process of the proposed auto-
matic wafer defect inspecting system (AWDIS). There are
four major steps of the AWDIS. First, a median filter is
used to remove noise. Second, the blocking process divides
the wafer image into blocks to obtain the contextual and
spatial information of wafers. Thirdly, according to the
contextual and spatial information of the blocks, the wafer
image is classified into four clusters. Finally, a proposed
952 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958

…… of the image. Observing these four defective wafer images,

Die Median Filter Blocking we can conclude that the intensity of the defective regions
Die
tends to be dark and the shapes of the defective

…
Image image
regions are irregular. Therefore, by comparing the normal
regions with the defective regions, we found that the defec-
Inspection Defect Self-Organizing tive regions reveal large color variances and irregular
Result Detecting Neural Network
shapes. Nevertheless, the color of the regular pad area is
similar to the defective regions. Therefore, it is difficult to
Fig. 2. The overall process of the proposed automatic wafer defect
separate the defective regions from the wafer image directly
inspection system, AWDIS.
by a histogram-based image processing scheme, such as
thresholding.
heuristic defect detecting algorithm is used to determine
which cluster represents defective regions. 2.2. Median filtering

To improve the accuracy of wafer defect inspection,

2.1. Characteristics of defective wafers
Fig. 3 shows four defective wafer images where defective
regions were outlined by rectangles. All the wafer images
were taken from scanning electron microscopes (SEM).
Obviously, these images contain contaminations. Fig. 3a
is a 50 wafer image. A lot of contamination was scattered
on the bonding pad area. Fig. 3b is a 100 wafer image.
We can clearly find a large defective area in the right half
of the image. Fig. 3c is also a 100 wafer image. As can
be seen, a large defective area exists in the middle of the
image. Fig. 3d is a 100 wafer image. A lot of defective
regions were scattered in the left half and in the bottom
median filtering is used to remove noise before wafer defect
inspection begins (Gonzalez & Woods, 2002). The median
filtering is defined as
f ðx; yÞ ¼ medianfgðs; tÞg; ðs; tÞ 2 S xy ð1Þ
where g(s,t) is the gray level of pixels in the mask and Sxy is
the mask area centered on (x,y).
2.3. Blocking
As mentioned above, the intensity of defective regions
tends to be dark and the shapes of defective regions are
irregular. Meanwhile, the color of the regular pad area is

Fig. 3. Four defective wafer images.

 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958 953

similar to the defective regions. Thus, the segmentation
performance of the histogram-based dynamic thresholding
method (Cheriet, Said, & Suen, 1998) is poor. In order to
obtain the appropriate clustering results, we have to con-
sider the color information of the image and the spatial
information of the neighboring pixels at the same time
(Wang et al., 2001). Accordingly, the wafer images are
divided into n blocks of size m  m to obtain the spatial
information. Then the spatial information of each block
is applied to the input of the proposed SONN.
2.4. Self-organizing neural network
Fig. 4 shows the architecture of the proposed self-orga-
nizing neural network. It is a fully connected network. The
wafer image is divided into n blocks of size m  m. Hence,
the sharper the structural variations in the image are. En-
tropy is a measure of the information content of C(a, b).
Large spaces have little information content, whereas clut-
tered areas have large information content. It has a mini-
mum value of 0 when all pixels have the same intensity.
Additionally, a small value means that the large values of
C(a, b) lie near the principal diagonal, in homogeneity. En-
ergy gives a measure of the homogeneity of an image. It is a
suitable measure for detection of disorders in textures. For
homogeneous textures value of energy turns out to be small
compared to non-homogeneous ones. The color informa-
tion is represented by the average value of the RGB com-
ponents. The average value of the RGB components
which represent the color information of the ith block is
determined as
1 X m X m

the spatial information of the neighboring pixels is decided, xR

i ¼ Rab ð6Þ
m2 a¼1 b¼1
in our case, by the corresponding suggested contextual
features – contrast, energy, entropy, and homogeneity 1 X m X m
xG
i ¼ Gab ð7Þ
(Arivazhagan & Ganesan, 2003). The corresponding con- m2 a¼1 b¼1
textual features of the ith block are determined as
1 X m X m
L X
X L xBi ¼ Bab ð8Þ
2 m2 a¼1 b¼1
Contrast Ci ¼ ða  bÞ Cða; bÞ ð2Þ
a¼1 b¼1
where Rab is the intensity of the red component at location
L X
X L
(a, b). Similarly, Gab and Bab denote the green and blue
2
Energy Eei ¼ C ða; bÞ ð3Þ
a¼1 b¼1
component at location (a, b), respectively.
L X
X L The inputs to the network shown in Fig. 4 can be written
Entropy Eti ¼  Cða; bÞlog2 Cða; bÞ ð4Þ in a vector form as
a¼1 b¼1
L X
X L
1 X ¼ ½F1 ; F2 ; . . . ; Fn  ð9Þ
Homogeneity Hi ¼ 2
Cða; bÞ ð5Þ
a¼1 b¼1 1 þ ða  bÞ where n is the number of blocks, and
 T
where C(a, b) is the co-occurrence matrix of the blocking Fi ¼ x R
i ; xG
i ; xBi ; xCi ; xEe
i ; xEt
i ; xH
i i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n
image. L denotes the number of gray levels in the die
ð10Þ
image. Contrast is a measure of the amount of local varia-
tions present in an image. A low contrast value results from The feature vector, Fi, on the ith block is organized by
a uniform image whereas an image with large variation the color components (red, green, and blue) and the con-
produces a high value. The higher the value of contrast is textual features (contrast, energy, entropy, and homogene-

w Rj wGj w Bj wCj w Ee Et H
j wj wj j … p

Fi
xiR xiG xiB xiC xiEe xiEt xiH i … n

Fig. 4. The architecture of the self-organizing neural network. The inputs are fully connected to each output neuron; however, only a few connections are
shown.
954 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958

ity), respectively. The synaptic weight vector of neuron j in crease gradually with increasing time k. This can be defined
the two dimensional array is given as as
 T  
Wj ¼ wR wG wBj ; wCj ; wEe wEt wH k
j ; j ; j ; j ; j lðkÞ ¼ l0 exp  ð14Þ
s0
j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; p ð11Þ
where s0 is a time constant; hqj(k) is the neighborhood func-
where p is the total number of output neurons. tion centered around the winning neuron q(Fi) at the dis-
The weight vector is also composed of the color compo- crete time index k, which is defined as:
nents and the contextual features. The best match of the ith !
input vector Fi with the synaptic weight vector Wj is deter- d 2qj
mined from hqj ðkÞ ¼ exp  2 ; ð15Þ
2r ðkÞ

i ¼ 1; 2 . . . ; n
qðFi Þ ¼ min kFi  Wj k2 ð12Þ where the lateral distance dqj and r(k) are defined by
8i;j j ¼ 1; 2 . . . ; p
d 2qj ¼ krj  rq k2 ; ð16Þ
where q(Fi) is the index into the output neuron array that
specifically identifies the winning neuron, and kk2 is the and
Euclidean norm.  
k
After the winning neuron is identified, the synaptic rðkÞ ¼ r0 exp  ; ð17Þ
weight vector associated with the winning neuron and the s1
neurons within a defined neighborhood of the winning neu- respectively. The rj and rq represent the coordinates of the
ron is given by neuron j and q, respectively. r0 is the initialized value and
Wj ðk þ 1Þ ¼ Wj ðkÞ þ lðkÞhqj ðkÞ½Fi ðkÞ  Wj ðkÞ ð13Þ s1 is a time constant. As time k increases, the width r(k) de-
creases at an exponential rate. Accordingly, the size of the
where the learning rate parameter, l(k), should be time topological neighborhood shrinks with time. In practice,
varying. It should start at an initial value l0, and then de- both the neighborhood hqj(k) and learning rate parameter

Fig. 5. The inspected results of defective wafer images, Fig. 3a, by the proposed AWDIS, the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method, k-means
clustering method, and fuzzy c-means clustering method are presented in (a), (b), (c), and (d), respectively.
 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958 955

l (k) are relatively large in the beginning of the training and defective class. The average intensity of each class can be
then decrease monotonically with time. represented as follows:
The algorithm of the proposed SONN is summarized as 1X R
follows: IðuÞ ¼ ðx þ xG B
i þ xi Þ; ð18Þ
s i2u i
(Step 1) Initialization: Randomly assign the initial synap- where s is the number of blocks of the u-th class, while xR i ,
tic weights. Initialize learning rate parameter. xG
i and x B
i represent the average value of red, green and blue
Define the topological neighborhood function. components of ith block in uth class, respectively. Accord-
(Step 2) Similarity matching: Use Eq. (12) to find the best- ingly, the suspicious defective class is defined as the class
matching neuron q(Fi) at time step k. whose I(u) is minimal. To determine whether the suspicious
(Step 3) Updating: Adjust the synaptic weight vectors of defective class represents defective regions, a threshold is
all neurons by using update formulas Eq. (13). used for testing:
(Step 4) According to Eqs. (14)–(17), update the learning
I defect ¼ min IðuÞ; IðuÞ 6 T ; ð19Þ
rate and neighborhood function. 8u
(Step 5) Repeat Step 2 through Step 4 until no noticeable where Idefect is the class number of the defective class and T
changes occur in the synaptic weights. is a predefined threshold. The heuristic defect detecting
algorithm is summarized as:
2.5. Defect detection
Input: the classified results by SONN.
According to the contextual and spatial information of Output: the class number represents defective regions.
the blocks, the SONN classifies the wafer image into four
classes. Then the proposed heuristic distinguishing algo- (Step 1) Calculate the number of blocks for each class.
rithm is used to determine which class contains defective (Step 2) Ignore the class whose number of blocks is zero.
region. As mentioned in Section 2.1, the intensity of defec- (Step 3) Use Eq. (18) to calculate the average intensity of
tive regions tends to be dark. Therefore, we select the class blocks for each class.
which has the lowest average intensity as the suspicious (Step 4) Use Eq. (19) to determine the defective class.

Fig. 6. The inspected results of defective wafer images, Fig. 3b, by the proposed AWDIS, the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method, k-means
clustering method, and fuzzy c-means clustering method are presented in (a), (b), (c), and (d), respectively.
956 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958

3. Experimental results
Two types of zoomed wafer images (50 and 100)
acquired from SEM were used for the test in this section.
The image sizes used for testing are 640  480 pixels, each
pixel consists of 24 bits (full color). The experiments were
conducted using Delphi programming on a Pentium 4
2.8 GHz platform with 256 M of memory.
To illustrate that the proposed AWDIS has the capacity
to detect defective regions, the proposed system was com-
pared with a histogram-based dynamic thresholding
method (Wang et al., 2001) which does not consider a pix-
el’s spatial information, a k-means clustering method (Dha-
wan, 2003; Kulkarni, 2001) which is a popular partitioning
method assuming the number of clusters is known, and a
fuzzy c-means method (Karayiannis et al., 1999) which is
a powerful method for clustering similar samples in a class.
In the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method,
the wafer image shown in Fig. 3 was transformed into gray
scale images with 256 gray levels. Figs. 5–8 show the
inspection results of Fig. 3 by using the proposed AWDIS,
the dynamic thresholding method, a k-means clustering
method, and a fuzzy c-means method. With the block size
set at 8  8, and the cluster number equal to four, the pro-
posed AWDIS with mean feature outlined the defective
regions with rectangles as shown in Fig. 5a, Fig. 6a,
Fig. 7a, and Fig. 8a. Fig. 5a shows the scattered contami-
nated regions correctly detected by the proposed AWDIS.
Fig. 5b shows the inspection results of the dynamic thres-
holding method with the threshold equal to 125. Since
the color of the bounding pad area is similar to the contam-
inations, the histogram-based dynamic thresholding
method could not detect the defective regions correctly.
Fig. 5c shows the results of the k-means clustering method
of 5 clusters, which also suffers from the problem caused
from similar colors. As can be seen, the k-means method
failed to separate the defective regions from the bounding
pad area. Fig. 5d shows the fuzzy c-means clustering
method performing better than both the dynamic thres-
holding and k-means methods, but there still many por-
tions of the bounding pad area in the defective cluster.
Fig. 6a shows that the scattered contaminations were
also detected correctly. However, the histogram-based
dynamic thresholding method, with the threshold value
of 120, fails to detect the defective regions as shown in
Fig. 6b. The k-means method, with k = 5, performs better
than the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method,
but many of the bounding pad areas are classified in the
defective class as shown in Fig. 6c. Similarly, the fuzzy c-
means clustering method, with c = 5, performs better than
the k-means method, with a smaller portion of the bound-
ing pad area in the defective class, as shown in Fig. 6d.

Fig. 7. The inspected results of defective wafer images, Fig. 3c, by the proposed AWDIS, the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method, k-means
clustering method, and fuzzy c-means clustering method are presented in (a), (b), (c), and (d), respectively.
 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958
AWDIS precisely outlines the defective region with rect-
angles as shown in the center of Fig. 7a. Fig. 7b–d, respec-
tively, show the inspection results of the dynamic
thresholding method, the k-means clustering method with
two clusters, and fuzzy c-means method, also with two
clusters. They reveal that if the colors of the defective
regions and normal regions were sufficiently different, all
these methods, including the AWDIS, could detect the con-
tamination correctly.
Fig. 8a shows another result of the AWDIS. There were
11 defective blocks detected, losing several tiny contami-
nated regions. Nevertheless, this does not adversely affect
the final inspection result. No matter how many defective
regions there are, we can always ascertain that a die is dam-
aged as long as we find one defect on it. A lot of dark pat-
terns are misdetected in the inspection results obtained by
the dynamic thresholding method, with a threshold value
of 135, as shown in Fig. 8b. Even the fuzzy c-means
method, shown as Fig. 8d, performs better than the
k-means clustering method, shown as Fig. 8c. Both the k-
means clustering and the fuzzy c-means methods fail to
separate the bounding pad area from the defective class.
To evaluate the performance of the proposed AWDIS,
we adopt the criteria suggested in Penedo, Carreria, Mos-
quera, and Cabello (1998) to define the sensitivity and spec-
ificity for performance evaluation. Let Np be the total
Fig. 8. The inspected results of defective wafer images, Fig. 3d, by the proposed AWDIS, the histogram-based dynamic thresholding method, k-means
clustering method, and fuzzy c-means clustering method are presented in (a), (b), (c), and (d), respectively.
957
block number of positive ROIs, and Nn denote the total
block number of negative ROIs. We also define Ntp to be
the block number of detected ROIs which contains defec-
tive regions and are actually detected. And, finally, let
Nfp be the block number of ROIs which contain no defec-
tive regions but are falsely detected. Similarly, the true neg-
ative number (Ntn) and false negative number (Nfn) can be
defined by Ntn = Nn  Nfp and Nfn = Np  Ntp, respec-
tively. According to Penedo et al. (1998), we can further
define the sensitivity and specificity by:
N tp
Sensitivity ¼ ð20Þ
Np
N tn
Specificity ¼ ð21Þ
Nn
In our evaluation, the positive ROIs were outlined by an
experienced testing engineer manually, while the detected
ROIs were detected by the proposed AWDIS. Thus, the re-
gions excluding the defective ROIs were negative ROIs.
Accordingly, the region that is truly positive is the intersec-
tion of the positive ROIs and the detected ROIs. The false
negative regions are the regions of regions intersection that
excluded the defective region by the testing engineer and
the proposed AWDIS.
In order to obtain the most appropriate block size and
number of clusters for AWDIS, experiments for various
958 C.-Y. Chang et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 950–958

Table 1 To resolve the difficulties associated with the traditional

Summary of different setups for AWDIS supervised neural networks based visual wafer defect
Mask size No. of clusters Sensitivity Specificity Time (s) inspection process – learned patterns specific to each appli-
22 2 0.972 0.870 1.28 cation – a self-organizing neural network-based automatic
22 3 0.966 0.963 1.84 wafer defect inspection system (AWDIS) is proposed in
22 4 0.819 0.963 1.50 this paper. Based on the characteristics of defective regions,
22 5 0.824 0.994 1.78
22 6 0.816 0.995 1.79
the wafer image was classified into four classes. A heuristic
22 7 0.816 0.993 1.85 distinguishing algorithm is proposed to determine which
22 8 0.714 0.992 2.09 class contains defective regions. By comparing the pro-
44 2 0.884 0.861 0.64 posed AWDIS with the traditional dynamic thresholding
44 3 0.879 0.964 0.73 method, it was found out that the proposed AWDIS is
44 4 0.962 1.000 0.72
44 5 0.855 1.000 0.72
more effective. The experimental results show, with good
44 6 0.755 1.000 0.78 performances, that the proposed method successfully iden-
44 7 0.788 1.000 0.82 tifies the defective regions on wafers.
44 8 0.751 1.000 0.80
88 2 0.974 0.823 0.55 Acknowledgement
88 3 0.967 1.000 0.53
88 4 0.967 1.000 0.52
88 5 0.967 1.000 0.54 This work was supported by the National Science Coun-
88 6 0.840 1.000 0.55 cil, Taiwan, ROC. under Grants NSC 94-2212-E-224-008.
88 7 0.834 1.000 0.55
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