Deformable Convolutional Networks for Efficient Mixed-Type Wafer Defect Pattern Recognition

Defect pattern recognition (DPR) of wafer maps is critical for determining the root cause of production defects, which can provide insights for the yield improvement in wafer foundries. During wafer fabrication, several types of defects can be coupled together in a piece of wafer, it is called mixed-type defects DPR. To detect mixed-type defects is much more complicated because the combination of defects may vary a lot, from the type of defects, position, angle, number of defects, etc. Deep learning methods have been a good choice for complex pattern recognition problems. In this article, we propose a deformable convolutional network (DC-Net) for mixed-type DPR (MDPR) in which several types of defects are coupled together in a piece of wafer. A deformable convolutional unit is designed to selectively sample from mixed defects, then extract high-quality features from wafer maps. A multi-label output layer is improved with a one-hot encoding mechanism, which decomposes extract mixed features into each basic single defect. The experiment results indicate that the proposed DC-Net model outperforms conventional models and other deep learning models. Further results of the interpretable analysis reveal that the proposed DC-Net can accurately pinpoint the defects areas of wafer maps with noise points, which is beneficial for mixed-type DPR problems.