Applied Materials Israel Limited

Yehonatan Hai Ofir

Boris Sherman

Ran Badanes

Boaz Cohen

Yehonatan Ridelman

Yotam Nissim Ben Shoshan

There is provided a system and method of examination a semiconductor specimen. The method includes obtaining a runtime image of the specimen; processing the runtime image using a first machine learning (ML) model to extract a set of runtime features representative of a set of patches in the runtime image; and comparing the set of runtime features with a bank of reference features, giving rise to an anomaly map indicative of one or more defective patches in the runtime image. The bank of reference features is previously generated by obtaining a plurality of synthetic reference images generated by a second ML model based on a plurality of actual images; and processing the plurality of synthetic reference images by the first ML model to extract, for each synthetic reference image, a set of reference features representative thereof, giving rise to the bank of reference features.

Machine learning based defect examination for semiconductor specimens

There is provided a system and method for defect examination on a semiconductor specimen. The method comprises obtaining a runtime image of the semiconductor specimen, generating a reference image based on the runtime image using a machine learning (ML) model, and performing defect examination on the runtime image using the generated reference image. The ML model is previously trained during setup using a training set comprising one or more pairs of training images, each pair including a defective image and a corresponding defect-free image. The training comprises, for each pair, processing the defective image by the ML model to obtain a predicted image, and optimizing the ML model to minimize a difference between the predicted image and the defect-free image.

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Rehovot, Israel

Yehonatan Hai Ofir