Article posted on Nov 1, 2019
To meet the challenges of the automotive industry, the electronics industry will have to make a fundamental shift in focus from process yield to product reliability. In an environment where the cost of reliability failure far exceeds the cost of yield loss, reliability and testing approaches that scrap nominally acceptable parts may be adopted more widely. Examples include guard-banding, where devices are scraped simply because they are located near a known defect, and part-averaging, which rejects statistical outliers even if they fall within process control limits. Process engineers and inspection and measurement system suppliers must focus on understanding the underlying causes of reliability failures with ever tighter process control, more precise measurements and more sensitive inspection. In addition, electronics manufacturers will need end-to-end process control with data management tools that provide detailed visibility across a supply chain that will certainly grow more complex.