A Comparative Analysis of Semiconductor Wafer Map Defect Detection with Image Transformer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the Data-Efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) outperforms traditional CNNs in classifying semiconductor wafer defects, especially under limited data conditions, enhancing predictive maintenance.

Contribution

It introduces the application of DeiT for wafer defect detection, showing superior accuracy and robustness over CNNs in data-constrained scenarios.

Findings

DeiT achieves 90.83% accuracy, outperforming CNNs.

DeiT demonstrates faster training convergence.

DeiT shows robustness in minority defect detection.

Abstract

Predictive maintenance is an important sector in modern industries which improves fault detection and cost reduction processes. By using machine learning algorithms in the whole process, the defects detection process can be implemented smoothly. Semiconductor is a sensitive maintenance field that requires predictability in work. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as VGG-19, Xception and Squeeze-Net have demonstrated solid performance in image classification for semiconductor wafer industry, their effectiveness often declines in scenarios with limited and imbalanced data. This study investigates the use of the Data-Efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) for classifying wafer map defects under data-constrained conditions. Experimental results reveal that the DeiT model achieves highest classification accuracy of 90.83%, outperforming CNN models such as VGG-19(65%), SqueezeNet(82%), Xception(66%) and Hybrid(67%). DeiT also demonstrated superior F1-score (90.78%) and faster training convergence, with enhanced robustness in detecting minority defect classes. These findings highlight the potential of transformer-based models like DeiT in semiconductor wafer defect detection and support predictive maintenance strategies within semiconductor fabrication processes.