Abstract
The dicing process cuts a semiconductor wafer to lengthwise and crosswise direction by using a rotating circular diamond blade. But inferior goods are made under the influence of several parameters in dicing such as blade, wafer, cutting water and cutting conditions. This paper describes a monitoring algorithm using neural network in order to find out an instant of vibration signal change when bad dicing appears. The algorithm is composed of two steps: feature extraction and decision. In the feature extraction, five features processed from vibration signal which is acquired by accelerometer attached on blade head are proposed. In the decision, back-propagation neural network is adopted to classify the dicing process into normal and abnormal dicing, and normal and damaged blade. Experiments have been performed for GaAs semiconductor wafer in the case of normal/abnormal dicing and normal/damaged blade. Based upon observation of the experimental results, the proposed scheme shown has a good accuracy of classification performance by which the inferior goods decreased from 35.2% to 6.5%.