Semi-supervised Wafer Map Pattern Recognition using Domain-Specific Data Augmentation and Contrastive Learning

Wafer map pattern recognition is instrumental for detecting systemic manufacturing process issues. However, high cost in labeling wafer patterns renders it impossible to leverage large amounts of valuable unlabeled data in conventional machine learning based wafer map pattern prediction. We proposed a contrastive learning framework for semi-supervised learning and prediction of wafer map patterns. Our framework incorporates an encoder to learn good representation for wafer maps in an unsupervised manner, and a supervised head to recognize wafer map patterns. In particular, contrastive learning is applied for the unsupervised encoder representation learning supported by augmented data generated by different transformations (views) of wafer maps. We identified a set of transformations to effectively generate similar variants of each original pattern. We further proposed a novel rotation-twist transformation to augment wafer map data by rotating each given wafer map for which the angle of rotation is a smooth function of the radius. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semi-supervised learning framework greatly improves recognition accuracy compared to traditional supervised methods, and the rotation-twist transformation further enhances the recognition accuracy in both semi-supervised and supervised tasks.