Transformer and Its Variants for Identifying Good Dice in Bad Neighborhoods

Cheng-Che Lu, Chi-Chih Chang, Chia-Heng Yen, Shuo-Wen Chang, Ying-Hua Chu, Kai-Chiang Wu, Mango Chia-Tso Chao

Abstract: Good-die-in-bad-neighborhood (GDBN) is a widely adopted method utilizing the fact that manufacturing defects tend to exhibit spatial dependency and form a cluster or specific pattern of bad dice on a wafer. Existing research studies on GDBN mainly focus on learning such spatial relationships within a limited observation window through simple mechanisms such as linear regression or multilayer perceptron model. In this paper, we propose MetaFormer-GDBN, a transformer-based deep learning model with the observation window extending to the entire wafer to include broader pattern information. The enhanced neighboring information and model capacity allow our method to capture more complex patterns of bad dice. Experiments show that compared to previous work, our method can achieve up to 50 % performance improvement, reducing the DPPM (defective parts per million) with minimal yield loss.