SePArate: Segmenting Patterns from Defects in Wafer Manufacturing Using Weak Supervision

arXiv:2608.30410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In semiconductor manufacturing, defect analysis is essential, but manual inspection cannot scale. However, existing automated inspection methods remain insufficient for root-cause analysis and process optimization. To this end, we present SePArate, a weakly supervised wafer defect segmentation method. SePArate enables pixel-level separation of patterns by leveraging only image-level annotations. It consists of a three-phase training: encoder pretraining, knowledge transfer to learn spatial cues, and training on synthetic mixed-defect data for accurate segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that SePArate outperforms the baselines.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-09-01