Spatial defect pattern recognition on semiconductor wafers using model-based clustering and Bayesian inference

Defects on semiconductor wafers tend to cluster and the spatial defect patterns contain useful information about potential problems in the manufacturing process. This study proposes to use model-based clustering algorithms via Bayesian inferences for spatial defect pattern recognition on semiconductor wafers. These new algorithms can find the number of defect clusters as well as identify the pattern of each cluster automatically. They are capable of detecting curvilinear patterns, ellipsoidal patterns and nonuniform global defect patterns. Promising results have been obtained from simulation studies.     

Aggregating multiple classification results using fuzzy integration and stochastic feature selection

Classifying magnetic resonance spectra is often difficult due to the curse of dimensionality; scenarios in which a high-dimensional feature space is coupled with a small sample size. We present an aggregation strategy that combines predicted disease states from multiple classifiers using several fuzzy integration variants. Rather than using all input features for each classifier, these multiple classifiers are presented with different, randomly selected, subsets of the spectral features. Results from a set of detailed experiments using this strategy are carefully compared against classification performance benchmarks. We empirically demonstrate that the aggregated predictions are consistently superior to the corresponding prediction from the best individual classifier.