Semiconductor Product Engineering, Quality and Operations

lt;p>A little bit about me. My college degrees include BS & MS in Computer Engineering both from University of California. I have been in the semiconductor industry since 1984 fulfilling several different roles with increasing complexity and responsibility as my skills & experience grew.

My first job was a process development engineer involved in the 1 to 2 um CMOS technologies. My most recent position has involved board level product management & operations. In the early days of my career I was developing transistors & memory cells (i.e the building blocks of every semiconductor product). Later on I was responsible for model parameter extractions which were the building blocks of SPICE transistor model developments. During the latter half of my career I became interested in product & test engineering. So I used my knowledge of basics to move my career in that direction. More recently I have managed new product introductions for several types of products including ASICs, FPGA & mixed signal products.

Introduction.- Overall Picture of Product Development stages & where product engineers add value.- Get to know your products(s) intimately.- Put your reliability qualification plan & schedule together.- Put your characterization plans & schedule together.- Engineering Sample Phase.- Process Skew Lots (Assess Yield Variations, Yield pitfalls).- Assess your products' Reliability using industry standard specifications.- Analysis of failures to root cause is the key to a robust product.- Get ready for Production Silicon.- Compliance to Industry & Customer Standards.- Ring out the kinks in your manufacturing flow early.- Enable your manufacturing sites.- Start looking at cost reduction & manufacturing simplification.- Finance - Budgeting for char., rel. qual, boards etc.