RCANet: Root Cause Analysis via Latent Variable Interaction Modeling for Yield Improvement

Xiaopeng Zhang, Shoubo Hu, Zhitang Chen, Shengyu Zhu, Evangeline F. Y. Young, Pengyun Li, Cheng Chen, Yu Huang, Jianye Hao

Abstract: Identifying root causes of systematic defects is a crucial step in yield enhancement process of integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing. With increasing complexity of fabrication processes and decreasing sizes of pattern features, more systematic defects occur at advanced technology nodes, and traditional methods are unfeasible to directly identify failure causes, due to expensive time and labor costs. Root cause analysis (RCA) technology is thus studied to automatically identify common root causes in a short time. In this paper, we develop RCANet, an end-to-end unsupervised learning-based RCA framework, which analyses diagnosis reports of failing dies within a wafer and identifies both layout-aware and cell-internal root causes efficiently. Experimental results on designs with different technologies demonstrate that RCANet outperforms both a commercial tool and the state-of-the-art method.