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Nonregular fractional factorial designs are a preferable alternative to regular resolution IV designs because they avoid confounding 2‐factor interactions. As a result, nonregular designs can estimate and identify a few active 2‐factor interactions. However, due to the sometimes complex alias structure of nonregular designs, standard factor screening strategies can fail to identify all active effects. We report on a screening technique that takes advantage of the alias structure of these nonregular designs. This alias‐informed‐model‐selection (AIMS) technique has been used previously for a specific 6‐factor nonregular design. We show how the AIMS technique can be applied to 7‐ and 8‐factor nonregular designs, completing the exposition of this method for all 16‐run 2‐level designs that are viable alternatives to standard Resolution IV fractional factorial designs. We compare AIMS to three other standard analysis methods for nonregular designs, stepwise regression, the lasso, and the Dantzig selector. AIMS consistently outperforms these methods in identifying the set of active factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce ChatSQC, an innovative chatbot system that combines the power of OpenAI's Large Language Models (LLM) with a specific knowledge base in Statistical Quality Control (SQC). Our research focuses on enhancing LLMs using specific SQC references, shedding light on how data preprocessing parameters and LLM selection impact the quality of generated responses. By illustrating this process, we hope to motivate wider community engagement to refine LLM design and output appraisal techniques. We also highlight potential research opportunities within the SQC domain that can be facilitated by leveraging ChatSQC, thereby broadening the application spectrum of SQC. A primary goal of our work is to provide a template and proof-of-concept on how LLMs can be utilized by our community. To continuously improve ChatSQC, we ask the SQC community to provide feedback, highlight potential issues, request additional features, and/or contribute via pull requests through our public GitHub repository. Additionally, the team will continue to explore adding supplementary reference material that would further improve the contextual understanding of the chatbot. Overall, ChatSQC serves as a testament to the transformative potential of AI within SQC, and we hope it will spur further advancements in the integration of AI in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumption of normality is usually tied to the design and analysis of an experimental study. However, when dealing with lifetime testing and censoring at fixed time intervals, we can no longer assume that the outcomes will be normally distributed. This generally requires the use of optimal design techniques to construct the test plan for specific distribution of interest. Optimal designs in this situation depend on the parameters of the distribution, which are generally unknown a priori. A Bayesian approach can be used by placing a prior distribution on the parameters, thereby leading to an appropriate selection of experimental design. This, along with the model and number of predictors, can be used to derive the D‐optimal design for an allowed number of experimental runs. This paper explores using this Bayesian approach on various lifetime regression models to select appropriate D‐optimal designs in regular and irregular design regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most electronic devices are susceptible to electromagnetic interference (EMI); thus, it is necessary to recognize and identify the cause and effect of EMI as it can corrupt electronic signals and degrade equipment performance. Particularly, in semiconductor manufacturing, the equipment used for image capturing is subject to various noises induced by EMI, causing the image analysis to be unreliable during the image recognition and digitization process. Thus, in this research, we aim to detect and quantify the influence of EMI on semiconductor SEM (scanning electron microscope) images. For this, we apply several useful denoising and edge detection techniques to find a clearer distorted shape from EMI-generated images and then compute five shape-related measures to evaluate the distortion. From a comprehensive experimental analysis and statistical tests, it is found that the medians of all the extracted shape-related measures of high-EMI SEM images are higher than those of both medium- and weak-EMI SEM images, and also all the p-values of the statistical tests are close to 0, and thus we can conclude that all the measures are good quantification metrics for assessing the impact of EMI on semiconductor SEM images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, defective dies on semiconductor wafer maps tend to form spatial clusters in distinguishable patterns which contain crucial information on specific problems of equipment or process, thus it is highly important to identify and classify diverse defect patterns accurately. However, in practice, there exists a serious class imbalance problem, that is, the number of the defective dies on semiconductor wafer maps is usually much smaller than that of the non‐defective dies. In various machine learning applications, a typical classification algorithm is, however, developed under the assumption that the number of instances for each class is nearly balanced. If the conventional classification algorithm is applied to a class imbalanced dataset, it may lead to incorrect classification results and degrade the reliability of the classification algorithm. In this research, we consider the semiconductor wafer defect bin data combined with wafer warpage information and propose a new hybrid resampling algorithm to improve performance of classifiers. From the experimental analysis, we show that the proposed algorithm provides better classification performance compared to other data preprocessing methods regardless of classification models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]