Ensights

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is surrounding us with extraordinary technologies that did not exist a few years ago. Autonomous vehicles are already being tested on public streets. Drones range from simple adolescent playthings to short- and long-range military and civilian purposes like surveying landforms, shooting movies, and delivering packages. Vast amounts of video content, created by professionals and amateurs alike, are being filmed, streamed, and stored. Surveillance, both fixed and mobile, is becoming commonplace, server farms are bigger than ever, and 4G networks are being supplemented or replaced with 5G. What all these trends have in common is that they generate enormous amounts of data that must be processed, transported, and stored faster and more reliably than ever before.

Most equipment and process engineers become experts at analyzing a wafer map to quickly identify signatures indicating when their equipment or process was the perpetrator of a maverick yield event. But as defect signatures become more subtle and harder to quickly identify, there is a significant need to consider not just what in-line inspection systems are identifying, but specifically what they are not identifying.