Automating the semiconductor industry: Electron microscopes, AI and ML

To support semiconductor manufacturers’ needs to automate, advanced electron microscopes are integrating AI capabilities to provide faster time-to-data and increase the productivity of human and tool resources.

By David Akerson, Sr. Global Market Development Manager and John Flanagan, Software Engineer, Thermo Fisher

Over the last five years, interest in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications in the semiconductor industry has grown rapidly. With processes and tools that generate petabytes of data, AI, with its ability to mine and utilize data, offers many opportunities to semiconductor manufacturers as they strive to improve processes, optimize human and tool resources, and automate labor intensive tasks. Among the many opportunities from AI and ML are process automation, tool optimization, fault detection and classification, predictive tool maintenance, metrology, process control, fleet management and many more.