Despite significant advancements in deep classification techniques and in-lab automatic optical inspection (AOI) models for long-tailed or highly imbalanced data, applying these approaches to real-world IC defect classification tasks remains challenging. This difficulty stems from two primary factors. First, real-world conditions, such as the high yield-rate requirements in the IC industry, result in data distributions that are far more skewed than those found in general public imbalanced datasets. Consequently, classifiers designed for open imbalanced datasets often fail to perform effectively in real-world scenarios. Second, real-world samples exhibit a mix of class-specific attributes (e.g., defect types) and class-agnostic, domain-related features (e.g., design characteristics of product lines). This complexity adds significant difficulty to the classification process, particularly for highly imbalanced datasets. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the IC-Defect-14 dataset, a large, highly imbalanced IC defect image dataset sourced from AOI systems deployed in real-world IC production lines. This dataset is characterized by its unique “intra-class clusters” property, which presents two major challenges: large intra-class diversity and high inter-class similarity. These characteristics, rarely found simultaneously in existing public datasets, significantly degrade the performance of current state-of-the-art classifiers for highly imbalanced data. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Regional Channel Attention-based Multi-Expert Network (ReCAME-Net). This network follows a multi-expert classifier framework and integrates a regional channel attention module, metric learning losses, a hard category mining strategy, and a knowledge distillation procedure. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that ReCAME-Net outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on the IC-Defect-14 dataset while maintaining comparable performance and competitiveness on general public datasets. Our resources can be found at https://github.com/YoursEver/ReCAME-Net.

Recent advances in VLSI fabrication technology have led to die shrinkage and increased layout density, creating an urgent demand for advanced hotspot detection techniques. However, by taking an object detection network as the backbone, recent learning-based hotspot detectors learn to recognize only the problematic layout patterns in the training data. This fact makes these hotspot detectors difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios. We propose a novel lithography simulator-powered hotspot detection framework to overcome this difficulty. Our framework integrates a lithography simulator with an object detection backbone, merging the extracted latent features from both the simulator and the object detector via well-designed cross-attention blocks. Consequently, the proposed framework can be used to detect potential hotspot regions based on 1) the variation of possible circuit shape deformation estimated by the lithography simulator and 2) the problematic layout patterns already known. To this end, we utilize RetinaNet with a feature pyramid network as the object detection backbone and leverage LithoNet as the lithography simulator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed simulator-guided hotspot detection framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on real-world data.

Learning-based presimulation (i.e., layout-to-fabrication) models have been proposed to predict the fabrication-induced shape deformation from an IC layout to its fabricated circuit. Such models are usually driven by pairwise learning, involving a training set of layout patterns and their reference shape images after fabrication. However, it is expensive and time consuming to collect the reference shape images of all layout clips for model training and updating. To address the problem, we propose a deep-learning-based layout novelty detection scheme to identify novel (unseen) layout patterns, which cannot be well predicted by a pretrained presimulation model. We devise a global–local novelty scoring mechanism to assess the potential novelty of a layout by exploiting two subnetworks: 1) an autoencoder and 2) a pretrained presimulation model. The former characterizes the global structural dissimilarity between a given layout and training samples, whereas the latter extracts a latent code representing the fabrication-induced local deformation. By integrating the global dissimilarity with the local deformation boosted by a self-attention mechanism, our model can accurately detect novelties without the ground-truth circuit shapes of test samples. Based on the detected novelties, we further propose two active-learning strategies to sample a reduced amount of representative layouts most worthy to be fabricated for acquiring their ground-truth circuit shapes. Experimental results demonstrate: 1) the effectiveness of our layout novelty detection algorithm and 2) the ability of our active-learning strategies in selecting representative novel layouts for keeping a learning-based presimulation model updated.

We propose a deep learning-based data-driven framework consisting of two convolutional neural networks: 1) LithoNet that predicts the shape deformations on a circuit due to IC fabrication and 2) OPCNet that suggests IC layout corrections to compensate for such shape deformations. By learning the shape correspondences between pairs of layout design patterns and their scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of the product wafer thereof, given an IC layout pattern, LithoNet can mimic the fabrication process to predict its fabricated circuit shape. Furthermore, LithoNet can take the wafer fabrication parameters as a latent vector to model the parametric product variations that can be inspected on SEM images. Besides, traditional optical proximity correction (OPC) methods used to suggest a correction on a lithographic photomask is computationally expensive. Our proposed OPCNet mimics the OPC procedure and efficiently generates a corrected photomask by collaborating with LithoNet to examine if the shape of a fabricated circuit optimally matches its original layout design. As a result, the proposed LithoNet-OPCNet framework can not only predict the shape of a fabricated IC from its layout pattern but also suggests a layout correction according to the consistency between the predicted shape and the given layout. Experimental results with several benchmark layout patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.