Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Semiconductor Manufacturing: Inspection and Metrology

AI and ML have great potential in many areas of the semiconductor manufacturing process, ranging in scale from improving the performance of individual tools to managing an entire fab and optimizing the global supply chain

Semiconductor manufacturers are increasingly challenged to measure and inspect new, smaller, and more complex 3D structures. Optical critical dimension (OCD) metrology has the fundamental capability needed for the measurements, but obtaining accurate results depends on deterministic physical modeling procedures that can be time-consuming and expensive. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques offer much faster solutions in many applications. Though AI and ML are unlikely to replace model-based measurements, they offer complementary strengths, suggesting that the best solutions will involve some combination of the two techniques.