Intelligent Fault Analysis Decision Flow in Semiconductor Industry 4.0 Using Natural Language Processing with Deep Clustering

Microelectronics production failure analysis is a time-consuming and complicated task involving successive steps of analysis of complex process chains. The analysis is triggered to find the root cause of a failure and its findings, recorded in a reporting system using natural language. Fault analysis, physical analysis, sample preparation and package construction analysis are arguably the most used analysis activity for determining the root-cause of a failure. Intelligent automation of this analysis decision process using artificial intelligence is the objective of the FA 4.0 consortium; creating a reliable and efficient semiconductor industry. This research presents natural language processing (NLP) techniques to find a coherent representation of the expert decisions during fault analysis. The adopted methodology is a Deep learning algorithm based on β-variational autoencoder (β-VAE) for latent space disentanglement and Gaussian Mixture Model for clustering of the latent space for class identification.