The development of an automatic post-sawing inspection system using computer vision techniques

This paper proposes an automated post-sawing inspection system (APSIS) for detecting defects on the wafer. The defect detection includes sawing defect s and pad defects. By adopting the reference method, some features extracte d from the reference image are used to compare with an inspecting image. Th e experiment results showed that the recognition rate of sawing defect and pad defect was 99.0% and 98.0%, respectively. The average processing time f or an 8-in. wafer approximated 75 min. An on-line implementation of the sys tem was proposed to reduce the processing time to less than half an hour. ( C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.