CycleGAN-Based Data Augmentation for Scanning Electron Microscope Images to Enhance Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Defect Classification

Semiconductor defect inspection is frequently hindered by data scarcity and the resulting class imbalance in supervised learning. This study proposes a CycleGAN-based data augmentation pipeline designed to synthesize realistic defective CD-SEM images from abundant normal patterns, incorporating a quantitative quality control mechanism. Using an ADI CD-SEM dataset, we conducted a sensitivity analysis by cropping original 1024 × 1024 micrographs into 512 × 512 and 256 × 256 inputs. Our results indicate that increasing the effective defect-area ratio is critical for improving generative stability and defect visibility. To ensure data integrity, we applied a screening protocol based on the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and a median absolute deviation noise metric to exclude low-fidelity outputs. When integrated into the training of XceptionNet classifiers, this filtered augmentation strategy yielded substantial performance gains on a held-out test set, specifically improving the Recall and F1 score while maintaining a near-ceiling AUC. These results demonstrate that controlled CycleGAN augmentation, coupled with objective quality filtering, effectively mitigates class imbalance constraints and significantly enhances the robustness of automated defect detection.