The Quality Imperative in High Volume Production of Electronic chips

Manufacturing process variation causes product inconsistency. In electronic parts production, particularly wafer fabrication, the same concepts apply. In addition, the fact that a wafer contains a population of individual electronic parts makes wafer processing an ideal candidate for the application of Statistical Process Control (SPC) concepts and rules. This paper presents an industrial situation in electronic parts manufacturing where process quality was greatly improved using SPC to study the causes of process variation. This resulted in significant increase in production yield and a remarkable reduction in production cost.