Abstract The high cost of collecting and annotating wafer bin maps (WBMs) necessitates few-shot WBM classification, i.e., classifying WBM defect patterns using a limited number of WBMs. Existing few-shot WBM classification algorithms mainly utilize meta-learning methods that leverage knowledge learned in several episodes. However, meta-learning methods require a large amount of additional real WBMs, which can be unrealistic. To help train a network with a few real-WBMs while avoiding this challenge, we propose the use of simulated WBMs to pre-train a classification model. Specifically, we employ transfer learning by pre-training a classification network with sufficient amounts of simulated WBMs and then fine-tuning it with a few real-WBMs. We further employ ensemble learning to overcome the overfitting problem in transfer learning by fine-tuning multiple sets of classification layers of the network. A series of experiments on a real-dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms the meta-learning methods that are widely used in few-shot WBM classification. Additionally, we empirically verify that transfer and ensemble learning, the two most important yet simple components of our model, reduce the prediction bias and variance in few-shot scenarios without a significant increase in training time.