Temperature is a critical parameter in yield improvement for wafer manufacturing. In chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment, crack defect in ceramic heater leads to yield reduction, however, there is no suitable ceramic heater fault detection system for conventional CVD equipment. This paper proposes a short-time zero-crossing rate based fault detection method for the ceramic heater in CVD equipment. The proposed method measures the output signal ($V_{pp}$) of RF filter and extracts the zero-crossing rate (ZCR) as feature vector. The extracted feature vectors have a discriminant power and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based fault detection method can detect fault in ceramic heater. Experimental results, carried out by measured signals provided by a CVD equipment manufacturer, indicate that the proposed method detects effectively faults in various process conditions.