Prediction of Material Removal Rate for Chemical Mechanical Planarization Using Decision Tree-Based Ensemble Learning

Chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) has been widely used in the semiconductor industry to create planar surfaces with a combination of chemical and mechanical forces. A CMP process is very complex because several chemical and mechanical phenomena (e.g., surface kinetics, electrochemical interfaces, contact mechanics, stress mechanics, hydrodynamics, and tribochemistry) are involved. Predicting the material removal rate (MRR) in a CMP process with sufficient accuracy is essential to achieving uniform surface finish. While physics-based methods have been introduced to predict MRRs, little research has been reported on monitoring and predictive modeling of the MRR in CMP. This paper presents a novel decision tree-based ensemble learning algorithm that can train the predictive model of the MRR. The stacking technique is used to combine three decision tree-based learning algorithms, including the random forests (RF), gradient boosting trees (GBT), and extremely randomized trees (ERT), via a meta-regressor. The proposed method is demonstrated on the data collected from a CMP tool that removes material from the surface of wafers. Experimental results have shown that the decision tree-based ensemble learning algorithm using stacking can predict the MRR in the CMP process with very high accuracy.