The Changing Face of Quality and Reliability
Welcome to 2001! This issue of Advancing Microelectronics is geared to Quality and Reliability, and promises to get you thinking about aspects of your product that relate to its acceptance by your customers-either from an end-of-life standpoint, or in some cases, an every day quality standpoint. Many of us have just completed (or are about to complete) our strategic and tactical goals for the year; I thought it was fitting that this issue be devoted to both strategic (end of life) and tactical (focus on everyday quality) articles as a result.
One of the difficulties that we experience, both as customers/consumers, and as providers/manufacturers, is the changing expectation in quality. These changing expectations affect every facet of our product, from out-of-the-box to end-of-life. Gone are the days when people expected the new model or the 1.0 version to have errors or flaws that needed to be worked out; now consumers want everything to be error-free, plug and play from the outset. Built-in obsolescence (intentionally designing your product to wear out, forcing a purchase of the same type of product more than once by the same customer) has also gone by the wayside for many consumables; many times, newer technologies are the reason for improved products, rather than replacements of ‘status quo’ materials. We only need to look to the American automobile to see this phenomenon demonstrated clearly. Before 1980, Americans expected to get a first model year car with some ‘bugs’ in it that would be designed out before the next year’s production. Perception of quality has not improved vastly since then, even though over 85% of the problems that were identified in the manufacturing process (through use of Failure Mode Effects Analysis and other tools) have been eliminated. Now, consumers expect a car to last longer than the car payments on it (in part due to the price of the cars); they expect the car to be maintenance-free for the first 50,000-100,000 miles; etc. Raising the levels of expectations has forced these companies to attain higher initial and end of life quality levels to maintain their market share, rather than increase their market share.
The same can be said for microelectronics packaging. The expectations of the 1980s are giving way to the reality of the 21st century. Where once we saw ourselves as supplying products that required special handling (air or water cooling, controlled environments) or had to withstand extreme opposites (freezing cold, boiling hot, dropped from 6 ft., etc.) we now must meet these requirements-and much, much more-at higher production rates, lower costs, and with better reliability. Consumers expect our products to be reliable for much longer periods (as evidenced by the increase in the average mean time between fails, or MBTF); they expect to pay less for the parts, and they expect that they will be available in never-before seen production rates. This has resulted in an incredible push to expand the limits of technology to meet the availability and manufacturability of the products that our customers are demanding. And customers no longer want to pay ‘extra’ for features (that may result in increased manufacturing costs) in order to provide a more reliable product; they demand these higher performance products as part of their standard order.
How can we hope to meet these expectations? Part of the answer lies in technical vitality. If we keep abreast of new developments, attend conferences and symposia to learn the latest techniques for improving quality and reliability, and continue to incorporate technical reading into our weekly work habits, we stand a good chance of coming across a new or different approach to the technical problems that we all face. I hope you enjoy this issue of Advancing Microelectronics. If you have any comments or suggestions for future issues, please contact me at Mary.McDonald@Motorola.com.
| Table of Contents | Previous Page | Next Page |
