A study of improving overlay accuracy by applying a new outlier handling method in FPD manufacturing

As the pixel size of display devices has been reduced, overlay accuracy between layers needs to be more improved in flat panel display (FPD) manufacturing. However, because of large substrate size and non-uniform processes in FPD manufacturing, an improvement of overlay accuracy has been a challenging work. As an effort to improve overlay accuracy, overlay error correction, which is a kind of feedback control similar to one in semiconductor manufacturing, has also been applied in the photo lithography processes for FPD. However, its characteristics and problems were not technically well investigated as much as in semiconductor manufacturing. This paper investigates one of the problems encountered in the practice of the overlay error correction: outliers in the measurement of overlay errors. Such outliers can cause undesirable effects on overlay accuracy, if used for the overlay error correction. In order to systematically cope with such outliers, a new framework is proposed for detecting and handling outliers as well as for verifying the result. In the consideration of the proposed framework, a new outlier detecting and handling method is also proposed. This method is based on a robust regression technique and is compared with others through simulation to confirm its better performance.