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Continuous Improvement: Tools and Techniques for Reliability Improvement

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MEMS Reliability

Part of the book series: MEMS Reference Shelf ((MEMSRS))

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Abstract

One common feature of MEMs enabled products that have crossed the threshold of prototype volumes into large-scale volume production is that in a majority of cases, the product development effort from initial prototype to final market insertion lasted much longer than planned. A major cause of this has been designing in product reliability which has tended to be more of an afterthought rather than part of an active engineering effort at the start of the development cycle.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Chapter 1

  2. 2.

    A manufacturing lot can be defined rather arbitrarily as all the dice on a single wafer, or an assembly lot which could be an arbitrarily defined number of packaged parts.

  3. 3.

    Six Sigma is a Motorola trademark – “Six Sigma can be seen as: a vision; a philosophy; a symbol; a metric; a goal; a methodology” – [4].

  4. 4.

    See Chapter 2 Sec. 2.3

  5. 5.

    10,000 ppm = 10,000 parts/million = 1%.

  6. 6.

    c p = (USL–LSL)/6σ; c pk = Min[(USL–mean)/6σ, Mean–LSL)/6σ]. 

  7. 7.

    ASP – average sale price.

  8. 8.

    BEM: boundary-element method.

  9. 9.

    Class of computational algorithms employing random sampling – see [13]

  10. 10.

    “Available processes” include standard processes steps and flows from external foundries.

  11. 11.

    Available foundry services worldwide – http://www.yole.fr/pagesan/products/memsfoundries.asp

  12. 12.

    Interchangeable virtual instrument (IVI).

  13. 13.

    Cadence – SpectreTM or Synopsys SaberTM are examples of schematic capture tools.

  14. 14.

    Commercial Of The Shelf (COTS)

  15. 15.

    ASTM E2244-02 – Standard test method for in-plane length measurements of thin, reflecting films using an optical interferometer.

    ASTM E2245-02 – Standard test method for residual strain measurements of thin, reflecting films using an optical interferometer.

    ASTM E2246-02 – Standard test method for strain gradient measurements of thin, reflecting films using and optical interferometer.

  16. 16.

    Acceleration Factor (a F) is a constant derived from experimental data that relates the times to failure at two different stresses – see Section 2.2.

  17. 17.

    Total device hours (H) is the summation of the number of units in operation multiplied by the total time of operation.

  18. 18.

    See Section 2.5.1.

  19. 19.

    The factor 5.99 is the 95th percentile of the χ2 with 2 degrees of freedom which corresponds to 0 failures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lilliputian Systems, Inc., 36 Jonspin Road, Wilmington, MA, 01887-1091, USA

    Allyson L. Hartzell

  2. RSTC, MS-112, Analog Devices Inc., 804 Woburn Street, Wilmington, MA, 01887, USA

    Mark G. da Silva

  3. Microsystems for Space Technologies Laboratory, EPFL, Rue Jaquet-Droz 1, CH-2002, Neuchatel, Switzerland

    Herbert R. Shea

Authors
  1. Allyson L. Hartzell
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  2. Mark G. da Silva
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  3. Herbert R. Shea
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Correspondence to Allyson L. Hartzell .

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Hartzell, A.L., da Silva, M.G., Shea, H.R. (2011). Continuous Improvement: Tools and Techniques for Reliability Improvement. In: MEMS Reliability. MEMS Reference Shelf. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6018-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6018-4_7

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