Developing a product quality fault detection scheme

In current semiconductor and TFT-LCD factories, periodic sampling is commonly adopted to monitor the stability of manufacturing processes and the quality of products (or workpieces). As for those non-sampled workpieces, their quality is usually monitored by such as a fault-detection-and-classification (FDC) server. However, this method may fail to detect defected products. For example, a workpiece with all the individual manufacturing process parameters being in-spec may still result in out-of-spec product quality. Under this circumstance, unless this certain defected workpiece is selected for sampling by chance, it cannot be detected by simply monitoring the manufacturing process parameters collected from the production equipment. To solve the above mentioned problem, this research proposes a product quality fault detection scheme (FDS), which utilizes the classification and regression tree to implement a model for identifying the relationship between process parameters and out-of-spec products. Through this model, each set of normal manufacturing process parameters can be real-time and on-line examined to detect failure or defected products.