A golden-block-based self-refining scheme for repetitive patterned wafer inspections

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for detecting possible defects in two-dimensional wafer images with repetitive patterns using prior knowledge. It has a learning ability that is able to create a golden block database from the wafer image itself, modify and refine its content when used in further inspections. The extracted building block is stored as a golden block for the detected pattern. When new wafer images with the same periodical pattern arrives, we do not have to re-calculate its periods and building block. A new building block can be derived directly from the existing golden block after eliminating alignment differences. If the newly derived building block has better quality than the stored golden block, then the golden block is replaced with the new building block. With the proposed algorithm, our implementation shows that a significant amount of processing time is saved. And the storage overhead of golden templates is also reduced significantly by storing golden blocks only. Index terms:Wafer inspection -Golden template -PDI -Image-to-image reference methodGolden block 2

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