Unsupervised Anomaly Prediction with N-BEATS and Graph Neural Network in Multi-variate Semiconductor Process Time Series

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel models, N-BEATS and GNN, for multivariate time series anomaly prediction in semiconductor manufacturing, improving early fault detection and reducing computational costs.

Contribution

It presents a new two-stage anomaly prediction framework and compares univariate and graph-based forecasting models for better accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

GNN outperforms N-BEATS in forecasting accuracy

Both models predict anomalies effectively up to 50 time points

GNN requires fewer parameters and less computation

Abstract

Semiconductor manufacturing is an extremely complex and precision-driven process, characterized by thousands of interdependent parameters collected across diverse tools and process steps. Multi-variate time-series analysis has emerged as a critical field for real-time monitoring and fault detection in such environments. However, anomaly prediction in semiconductor fabrication presents several critical challenges, including high dimensionality of sensor data and severe class imbalance due to the rarity of true faults. Furthermore, the complex interdependencies between variables complicate both anomaly prediction and root-cause-analysis. This paper proposes two novel approaches to advance the field from anomaly detection to anomaly prediction, an essential step toward enabling real-time process correction and proactive fault prevention. The proposed anomaly prediction framework contains two main stages: (a) training a forecasting model on a dataset assumed to contain no anomalies, and (b) performing forecast on unseen time series data. The forecast is compared with the forecast of the trained signal. Deviations beyond a predefined threshold are flagged as anomalies. The two approaches differ in the forecasting model employed. The first assumes independence between variables by utilizing the N-BEATS model for univariate time series forecasting. The second lifts this assumption by utilizing a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to capture inter-variable relationships. Both models demonstrate strong forecasting performance up to a horizon of 20 time points and maintain stable anomaly prediction up to 50 time points. The GNN consistently outperforms the N-BEATS model while requiring significantly fewer trainable parameters and lower computational cost. These results position the GNN as promising solution for online anomaly forecasting to be deployed in manufacturing environments.