PaLM: Point Cloud and Large Pre-trained Model Catch Mixed-type Wafer Defect Pattern Recognition

As the technology node scales down to 5nml3nm, the consequent difficulty has been widely lamented. The defects on the surface of wafers are much more prone to emerge during manufacturing than ever. What's worse, various single-type defect patterns may be coupled on a wafer and thus shape a mixed-type pattern. To improve yield during the design cycle, mixed-type wafer defect pattern recognition is required to perform to identify the failure mechanisms. Based on these issues, we revisit failure dies on wafer maps by treating them as point sets in two-dimensional space and propose a two-stage classification framework, PoLM. The challenge of noise reduction is considerably improved by first using an adaptive alpha-shapes algorithm to extract intricate geometric features of mixed-type patterns. Unlike sophisticated frameworks based on CNNs or Transformers, PoLM only completes classification within a point cloud cluster for aggregating and dispatching features. Furthermore, recognizing the remarkable success of large pre-trained foundation models (e.g., OpenAI's GPT-n series) in various visual tasks, this paper also introduces a training paradigm leveraging these pre-trained models and fine-tuning to improve the final recognition. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art methodologies in classifying mixed-type wafer defect patterns.