Deposition uniformity inspection in IC wafer surface

This paper focuses on the task of automatic visual inspection of color uniformity on the surface of integrated circuits (IC) wafers arising from the layering process. The oxide thickness uniformity within a given wafer with a desired target thickness is of great importance for modern semiconductor circuits with small oxide thickness. The non-uniform chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on a wafer surface will proceed to fail testing in Wafer Acceptance Test (WAT). Early detection of non-uniform deposition in a wafer surface can reduce material waste and improve production yields. The fastest and most low-priced inspection method is a machine vision-based inspection system. In this paper, the proposed visual inspection system is based on the color representations which were reflected from wafer surface. The regions of non-uniform deposition present different colors from the uniform background in a wafer surface. The proposed inspection technique first learns the color data via color space transformation from uniform deposition of normal wafer surfaces. The individual small region statistical comparison scheme then proceeds to the testing wafers. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect the non-uniform deposition regions on the wafer surface. The inspection time of the deposited wafers is quite compatible with the atmospheric pressure CVD time.