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As we enter a New Year, we can look back on another year of solid accomplishment at IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing. I am happy to report that our impact factor remains steady at 2.70, and our mean time to first decision remains competitive at 8.3 weeks. Our Editorial Board remains as strong as ever, with the addition of Dr. Jun-Haeng Lee in the area of machine learning and data science applications in 2023, and we are actively seeking new board members. Our submissions remain strong, as do the special sections from conferences (ASMC, ISSM and CS-MANTECH). The Special Issue on Production-Level Artificial Intelligence Applications in Semiconductor Manufacturing appeared in the November issue, and two additional special issues are in preparation. Prof. Duane Boning of MIT and Dr. Bill Nehrer of Technology Consultancy are co-editing a special issue on “Semiconductor Design for Manufacturing,” which will be a collaborative effort with the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. Drs. Oliver Patterson of Intel and Tomasz Brozek of PDF Solutions are also co-editing a special issue on sustainable semiconductor manufacturing. We are also happy to announce the Best paper Award for 2023, in the companion editorial appearing in this issue. Congratulations to all the honorees, and we hope we will continue to see their submissions in the future. Our thanks go to Drs. Jeanne Bickford, Dragan Djurdjanovic and Mahadeva Iyer Natarajan for their work on this committee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In semiconductor manufacturing processes, virtual metrology (VM) has been investigated as a promising tool to predict important characteristics of products. Although partial least squares (PLS) is a well-known modeling technique that can cope with collinearity and therefore applied to construction of VM, its prediction performance deteriorates due to changes in process characteristics. In particular, maintenance of equipment strongly affects the process characteristics and the prediction performance. In this paper, VM was developed by using locally weighted PLS (LW-PLS), which is a type of just-in-time modeling technique, and it was used to predict the etching conversion differential of an actual dry etching process. The industrial application results have shown that the developed VM based on LW-PLS is superior to the conventional VM based on the sequential update model and artificial neural network model. In particular, it has been confirmed that the LW-PLS-based VM can keep its high prediction performance even after the maintenance, i.e., replacement of parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]