High-Fidelity Synthetic Transmission Electron Microscopy Image Generation Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Data-Limited Semiconductor Metrology

arXiv:2606.24817v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves the global structural and spatial relationships relevant to FAB metrology. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. On the closest 1% of nearest-neighbor pairs, our synthetic DEVICE-TEM images reach MS-SSIM $0.985 \pm 0.002$ (full-set mean $0.587$), and a blinded qualitative expert assessment is consistent with the structural similarity results. The synthetic images are intended as training data for downstream ML in defect detection, segmentation, and metrology.