The fabrication of semiconductor involves etching process to remove selected areas from wafers. However, the measurement of etched structure in micro-graph heavily relies on time-consuming manual routines. Traditional image processing usually demands on large number of annotated data and the performance is still poor. We treat this challenge as segmentation problem and use deep learning approach to detect masks of objects in etched structure of wafer. Then, we use simple image processing to carry out automatic measurement on the objects. We attempt Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to generate more data to overcome the problem of very limited dataset. We download 10 SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) images of 4 types from Internet, based on which we carry out our experiments. Our deep learning based method demonstrates superiority over image processing approach with  mean accuracy reaching over 96% for the measurements, compared with the ground truth. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that deep learning has been applied in semiconductor industry for automatic measurement.
Using deep learning method to carry out automatic measurement of SEM images in semiconductor industry