Abstract
This paper proposes an automated post-sawing inspection system (APSIS) for detecting defects on the wafer. The defect detection includes sawing defects and pad defects. By adopting the reference method, some features extracted from the reference image are used to compare with an inspecting image. The experiment results showed that the recognition rate of sawing defect and pad defect was 99.0% and 98.0%, respectively. The average processing time for an 8-in. wafer approximated 75 min. An on-line implementation of the system was proposed to reduce the processing time to less than half an hour.