PROCESS CONTROL OF SEMICONDUCTOR FABRICATION BASED ON SPECTRA QUALITY METRICS

A process control method for manufacturing semiconductor devices, including determining a quality metric of a production semiconductor wafer by comparing production scatterometric spectra of a production structure of the production wafer with reference scatterometric spectra of a reference structure of reference semiconductor wafers, the production structure corresponding to the reference structure, the reference spectra linked by machine learning to a reference measurement value of the reference structure, determining a process control parameter value (PCPV) of a wafer processing step, the PCPV determined based on measurement of the production wafer and whose contribution to the PCPV is weighted with a first predefined weight based on the quality metric, and based on a measurement of a different wafer and whose contribution to the PCPV is weighted with a second predefined weight based on the quality metric, and controlling, with the PCPV, the processing step during fabrication.