Search Results (2)

Silicon wafer is the most crucial material in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. Owing to limited resources, the reclamation of monitor and dummy wafers for reuse can dramatically lower the cost, and become a competitive edge in this industry. However, defects such as void, scratches, particles, and contamination are found on the surfaces of the reclaimed wafers. Most of the reclaimed wafers with the asymmetric distribution of the defects, known as the “good (G)” reclaimed wafers, can be re-polished if their defects are not irreversible and if their thicknesses are sufficient for re-polishing. Currently, the “no good (NG)” reclaimed wafers must be first screened by experienced human inspectors to determine their re-usability through defect mapping. This screening task is tedious, time-consuming, and unreliable. This study presents a deep-learning-based reclaimed wafers defect classification approach. Three neural networks, multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN) and Residual Network (ResNet), are adopted and compared for classification. These networks analyze the pattern of defect mapping and determine not only the reclaimed wafers are suitable for re-polishing but also where the defect categories belong. The open source TensorFlow library was used to train the MLP, CNN, and ResNet networks using collected wafer images as input data. Based on the experimental results, we found that the system applying CNN networks with a proper design of kernels and structures gave fast and superior performance in identifying defective wafers owing to its deep learning capability, and the ResNet averagely exhibited excellent accuracy, while the large-scale MLP networks also acquired good results with proper network structures. Full article

This study reports on the use of a substrate-reclamation technology for a gallium nitride (GaN)-based lighting-emitting diode (LED) wafer. There are many ways to reclaim sapphire substrates of scrap LED wafers. Compared with a common substrate-reclamation method based on chemical mechanical polishing, this research technology exhibits simple process procedures, without impairing the surface morphology and thickness of the sapphire substrate, as well as the capability of an almost unlimited reclamation cycle. The optical performances of LEDs on non-reclaimed and reclaimed substrates were consistent for 28.37 and 27.69 mcd, respectively. Full article