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Main Authors: Shinde, Prashant P., Pai, Priyadarshini P., Adiga, Shashishekar P., Mayya, K. Subramanya, Seo, Yongbeom, Hwang, Myungsoo, Go, Heeyoung, Park, Changmin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10192
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author Shinde, Prashant P.
Pai, Priyadarshini P.
Adiga, Shashishekar P.
Mayya, K. Subramanya
Seo, Yongbeom
Hwang, Myungsoo
Go, Heeyoung
Park, Changmin
author_facet Shinde, Prashant P.
Pai, Priyadarshini P.
Adiga, Shashishekar P.
Mayya, K. Subramanya
Seo, Yongbeom
Hwang, Myungsoo
Go, Heeyoung
Park, Changmin
contents In the photolithographic process vital to semiconductor manufacturing, various types of defects appear during EUV pattering. Due to ever-shrinking pattern size, these defects are extremely small and cause false or missed detection during inspection. Specifically, the lack of defect-annotated quality data with good representation of smaller defects has prohibited deployment of deep learning based defect detection models in fabrication lines. To resolve the problem of data unavailability, we artificially generate scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of line patterns with known distribution of defects and autonomously annotate them. We then employ state-of-the-art object detection models to investigate defect detection performance as a function of defect size, much smaller than the pitch width. We find that the real-time object detector YOLOv8 has the best mean average precision of 96% as compared to EfficientNet, 83%, and SSD, 77%, with the ability to detect smaller defects. We report the smallest defect size that can be detected reliably. When tested on real SEM data, the YOLOv8 model correctly detected 84.6% of Bridge defects and 78.3% of Break defects across all relevant instances. These promising results suggest that synthetic data can be used as an alternative to real-world data in order to develop robust machine-learning models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10192
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Defect Detection in Photolithographic Patterns Using Deep Learning Models Trained on Synthetic Data
Shinde, Prashant P.
Pai, Priyadarshini P.
Adiga, Shashishekar P.
Mayya, K. Subramanya
Seo, Yongbeom
Hwang, Myungsoo
Go, Heeyoung
Park, Changmin
Machine Learning
In the photolithographic process vital to semiconductor manufacturing, various types of defects appear during EUV pattering. Due to ever-shrinking pattern size, these defects are extremely small and cause false or missed detection during inspection. Specifically, the lack of defect-annotated quality data with good representation of smaller defects has prohibited deployment of deep learning based defect detection models in fabrication lines. To resolve the problem of data unavailability, we artificially generate scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of line patterns with known distribution of defects and autonomously annotate them. We then employ state-of-the-art object detection models to investigate defect detection performance as a function of defect size, much smaller than the pitch width. We find that the real-time object detector YOLOv8 has the best mean average precision of 96% as compared to EfficientNet, 83%, and SSD, 77%, with the ability to detect smaller defects. We report the smallest defect size that can be detected reliably. When tested on real SEM data, the YOLOv8 model correctly detected 84.6% of Bridge defects and 78.3% of Break defects across all relevant instances. These promising results suggest that synthetic data can be used as an alternative to real-world data in order to develop robust machine-learning models.
title Defect Detection in Photolithographic Patterns Using Deep Learning Models Trained on Synthetic Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10192