Fault Diagnosis in Semiconductor Etch Equipment Using Bayesian Networks

A Bayesian network (BN) based fault diagnosis framework for semiconductor etching equipment is presented. Suggested framework contains data preprocessing, data synchronization, time series modeling, and BN inference, and the established BNs show the cause and effect relationship in the equipment module level. Statistically significant state variable identification (SVID) data of etch equipment are preselected using principal component analysis (PCA) and derivative dynamic time warping (DDTW) is employed for data synchronization. Elman's recurrent neural networks (ERNNs) for individual SVID parameters are constructed, and the predicted errors of ERNNs are then used for assigning prior conditional probability in BN inference of the fault diagnosis. For the demonstration of the proposed methodology, 300 mm etch equipment model is reconstructed in subsystem levels, and several fault diagnosis scenarios are considered. BNs for the equipment fault diagnosis consists of three layers of nodes, such as root cause (RC), module (M), and data parameter (DP), and the constructed BN illustrates how the observed fault is related with possible root causes. Four out of five different types of fault scenarios are successfully diagnosed with the proposed inference methodology.