• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.32-32
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• 2011

Plasma etching is used in microelectronic processing for patterning of micro- and nano-scale devices. Commonly, optical emission spectroscopy (OES) is widely used for real-time endpoint detection for plasma etching. However, if the viewport for optical-emission monitoring becomes blurred by polymer film due to prolonged use of the etching system, optical-emission monitoring becomes impossible. In addition, when the exposed area ratio on the wafer is small, changes in the optical emission are so slight that it is almost impossible to detect the endpoint of etching. For this reason, as a simple method of detecting variations in plasma without contamination of the reaction chamber at low cost, a method of measuring plasma impedance is being examined. The object in this research is to investigate the suitability of using plasma impedance monitoring (PIM) with statistical approach for real-time endpoint detection of $SiO_2$ etching. The endpoint was determined by impedance signal variation from I-V monitor (VI probe). However, the signal variation at the endpoint is too weak to determine endpoint when $SiO_2$ film on Si wafer is etched by fluorocarbon plasma on inductive coupled plasma (ICP) etcher. Therefore, modified principal component analysis (mPCA) is applied to them for increasing sensitivity. For verifying this method, detected endpoint from impedance analysis is compared with optical emission spectroscopy (OES). From impedance data, we tried to analyze physical properties of plasma, and real-time endpoint detection can be achieved.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.153-153
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• 2012

Endpoint detection with plasma impedance monitoring and self-plasma optical emission spectroscopy is demonstrated for dielectric layers etching processes. For in-situ detecting endpoint, optical-emission spectroscopy (OES) is used for in-situ endpoint detection for plasma etching. However, the sensitivity of OES is decreased if polymer is deposited on viewport or the proportion of exposed area on the wafer is too small. To overcome these problems, the endpoint was determined by impedance signal variation from I-V monitoring (VI probe) and self-plasma optical emission spectroscopy. In addition, modified principal component analysis was applied to enhance sensitivity for small area etching. As a result, the sensitivity of this method is increased about twice better than that of OES. From plasma impedance monitoring and self-plasma optical emission spectroscopy, properties of plasma and chamber are analyzed, and real-time endpoint detection is achieved.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.81-88
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• 1999

This paper provides a method for speech detection. After first order FIR filtering on the speech signals, we applied the conventional method of endpoint detection which utilizes the energy as the criterion in separating signals from background noise. By FIR filtering, only the Fourier components with large values of [amplitude x frequency] become significant in energy profile. By applying this procedure to the 445-words database constructed from ETRI, we confirmed that the low-amplitude noise and/or the low-frequency noise are separated clearly from the speech signals, thereby enhancing the feasibility of ideal endpoint detections.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.111-117
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• 2009

In this paper, a new speech endpoint detector in noisy environment is proposed. According to the previous research, the energy feature in the speech region is easily distinguished from that in the speech absent region. In conventional method, the endpoint can be found by applying the edge detection filter that finds the abrupt changing point in feature domain. However, since the frame energy feature is unstable in noisy environment, the accurate edge detection is not possible. Therefore, in this paper, the novel feature extraction method based on spectrum envelop pattern is proposed. Then, the edge detection filter is applied to the proposed feature for detection of the endpoint. The experiments are performed in the car noise environment and a substantial improvement was obtained over the conventional method.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.57-64
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• 1999

In this paper, we investigated the robust endpoint detection algorithm in noisy environment. A new feature parameter based on a discrete wavelet transform is proposed for word boundary detection of isolated utterances. The sum of standard deviation of wavelet coefficients in the third coarse and weighted first detailed scale is defined as a new feature parameter for endpoint detection. We then developed a new and robust endpoint detection algorithm using the feature found in the wavelet domain. For the performance evaluation, we evaluated the detection accuracy and the average recognition error rate due to endpoint detection in an HMM-based recognition system across several signal-to-noise ratios and noise conditions.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.714-720
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• 2014

In this paper, we propose the use of data-driven probabilistic utterance-level decision logic to improve Weighted Finite State Transducer (WFST)-based endpoint detection. In general, endpoint detection is dealt with using two cascaded decision processes. The first process is frame-level speech/non-speech classification based on statistical hypothesis testing, and the second process is a heuristic-knowledge-based utterance-level speech boundary decision. To handle these two processes within a unified framework, we propose a WFST-based approach. However, a WFST-based approach has the same limitations as conventional approaches in that the utterance-level decision is based on heuristic knowledge and the decision parameters are tuned sequentially. Therefore, to obtain decision knowledge from a speech corpus and optimize the parameters at the same time, we propose the use of data-driven probabilistic utterance-level decision logic. The proposed method reduces the average detection failure rate by about 14% for various noisy-speech corpora collected for an endpoint detection evaluation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.1E
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• pp.21-26
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• 2007

In this paper, we propose a modified Viterbi algorithm to compensate for endpoint detection error during the decoding phase of an isolated word recognition task. Since the conventional Viterbi algorithm explores only the search space whose boundaries are fixed to the endpoints of the segmented utterance by the endpoint detector, the recognition performance is highly dependent on the accuracy level of endpoint detection. Inaccurately segmented word boundaries lead directly to recognition error. In order to relax the degradation of recognition accuracy due to endpoint detection error, we describe an unconstrained search of word boundaries and present an algorithm to explore the search space with efficiency. The proposed algorithm was evaluated by performing a variety of simulated endpoint detection error cases on an isolated word recognition task. The proposed algorithm reduced the Word Error Rate (WER) considerably, from 84.4% to 10.6%, while consuming only a little more computation power.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.182-182
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• 2012

Plasma etching is used in various semiconductor processing steps. In plasma etcher, optical- emission spectroscopy (OES) is widely used for in-situ endpoint detection. However, the sensitivity of OES is decreased if polymer is deposited on viewport or the proportion of exposed area on the wafer is too small. Because of these problems, the object is to investigate the suitability of using plasma impedance monitoring (PIM) and self plasma optical emission spectrocopy (SPOES) with statistical approach for in-situ endpoint detection. The endpoint was determined by impedance signal variation from I-V monitor (VI probe) and optical emission signal from SPOES. However, the signal variation at the endpoint is too weak to determine endpoint when $SiO_2$ and SiNx layers are etched by fluorocarbon on inductive coupled plasma (ICP) etcher, if the proportion of $SiO_2$ and SiNx area on Si wafer are small. Therefore, modified principal component analysis (mPCA) is applied to them for increasing sensitivity. For verifying this method, detected endpoint from impedance monitoring is compared with optical emission spectroscopy.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07e
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• pp.2216-2219
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• 2003

Accurate speech region detection and automatic syllable segmentation is important part of speech recognition system. In automatic speech recognition system, they are needed for the purpose of accurate recognition and less computational complexity, In this paper, we Propose improved syllable segmentation method using ramp edge detection method and residual signal Peak energy. These methods were used to ensure accuracy and robustness for endpoint detection and syllable segmentation system. They have almost invariant response to various background noise levels. As experimental results, we obtained the rate of 90.7％ accuracy in syllable segmentation in a condition of accurate endpoint detection environments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Statistical Society Conference
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• 2001.11a
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• pp.75-76
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• 2001

An endpoint detection method for speech signals utilizing hidden Markov model(HMM) is proposed. It turns out that the proposed algorithm is quite satisfactory to apply isolated word speech recognition.