DOE — QFD — SPC — FMEA…‥ CDT?

The PCB business is constrained on every side. On one side, material suppliers have price pressures that reflect increasing raw material and energy costs. On the other side, equipment manufacturers and assemblers are being driven by tighter market prices. In this squeeze, the PCB manufacturer has little scope in price manipulation or product changes. The answer therefore lies in improving yield. Yield improvement offers major opportunities for the PCB manufacturer to increase profit through increasing overall efficiency and reducing waste without changing input costs or increasing prices. To make pressure more intense, the industry is being driven to ever smaller and tighter geometries and higher tracking densities. As feature sizes reduce, the opportunities for defects increase. The requirement is to continually drive down the risk factors. This means a new approach to process management and techniques and relationships such as DOE (Design of Experiment), QFD (Quality Function Deployment), SPC (Statistical Process Control) and FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) are now the essential vernacular of our industry. There is one more abbreviation we want to add to this list CDT an acronym for crucial steps in yield improvement, the meaning and the value will soon become clear.