Mapping Oxidation and Wafer Cleaning to Device Characteristics Using Physics-Assisted Machine Learning.

It is always highly desired to have a well-defined relationship between the chemistry in semiconductor processing and the device characteristics. With the shrinkage of technology nodes in the semiconductors roadmap, it becomes more complicated to understand the relation between the device electrical characteristics and the process parameters such as oxidation and wafer cleaning procedures. In this work, we use a novel machine learning approach, i.e., physics-assisted multitask and transfer learning, to construct a relationship between the process conditions and the device capacitance voltage curves. While conventional semiconductor processes and device modeling are based on a physical model, recently, the machine learning-based approach or hybrid approaches have drawn significant attention. In general, a huge amount of data is required to train a machine learning model. Since producing data in the semiconductor industry is not an easy task, physics-assisted artificial intelligence has become an obvious choice to resolve these issues. The predicted C-V uses the hybridization of physics, and machine learning provides improvement while the coefficient of determination (R 2) is 0.9442 for semisupervised multitask learning (SS-MTL) and 0.9253 for transfer learning (TL), referenced to 0.6108 in the pure machine learning model using multilayer perceptrons. The machine learning architecture used in this work is capable of handling data sparsity and promotes the usage of advanced algorithms to model the relationship between complex chemical reactions in semiconductor manufacturing and actual device characteristics. The code is available at https://github.com/albertlin11/moscapssmtl.

A novel mutation in the CD40 ligand gene in a Chinese boy with X-linked hyper-IgM syndrome.

X-linked hyper-IgM Syndrome (XHIGM) is caused by a mutation of CD40 ligand (CD40L), which is normally expressed on activated CD4+ T cells and is responsible for immunoglobulin class switching. A 7-year-old boy with recurrent sino-pulmonary infections since the age of 3 months had normal CD3+, CD4+, CD8+T lymphocytes, and CD19+B lymphocytes and NK cells, but significantly elevated IgM and extremely decreased IgG and IgA. Sequencing of genomic DNA revealed that the patient had a 34 base deletion in intron 3 and exon 4 of CD40L(g.8172_8205del34bp), which lead to the entire deletion of exon 4 in cDNA (c.347_409del63bp, i.e.,exon 4 skipping) and an in-frame deletion of 21 amino acids in CD40L protein. Moreover, the patient had negligible CD40L expression on activated CD3+CD8-T lymphocytes. His mother and sister were carriers of the CD40L mutation. Our studies demonstrated a novel mutation in CD40L, which, to our knowledge, has not been reported previously.