Product Quality Prediction with Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture and Transfer Learning

Mining data collected from industrial manufacturing process plays an important role for intelligent manufacturing in Industry 4.0. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional model for predicting wafer fabrication quality in an intelligent integrated-circuit manufacturing application. The wafer fabrication quality prediction is motivated by the need for improving product line efficiency and reducing manufacturing cost by detecting potential defective work-in-process (WIP) wafers. This work considers the following two crucial data characteristics for wafer fabrication. First, our model is designed to learn spatial correlation between quality measurements on WIP wafers and fabrication results through an encoder-decoder neural network. Second, we leverage the fact that different products share the same raw manufacturing process to enable the knowledge transferring between prediction models of different products. Performance evaluation on real data sets is conducted to validate the strengths of our model on quality prediction, model interpretability, and feasibility of transferring knowledge.