Reducing test costs in electronics mass-production

Abstract

This paper studies the simultaneous optimisation of quality and costs in mass-production of complex electronics products. Testing has become a critical bottleneck for assuring quality, requiring a large amount of time, and resources. The volume of especially functional testing must be minimised to reduce costs. Sampling is a potential way to obtain this. Unfortunately, existing sampling methods are not functional in the modern electronics environment with multiple tests. This paper presents new efficient methods, based on continuous sampling plan (CSP) procedures. The applicability of the developed methods is confirmed empirically by analysing and simulating real industrial data.

Joint economic design of production, continuous sampling inspection and preventive maintenance of a deteriorating production system

“…The integrated production, CSP-1 and maintenance models proposed in this paper can be applied for continuous production systems subject to reliability and quality deteriorations, whose inspection is only performed at the end of production, and where both closed-loop productioninventory control and sampling plans are effective such as in the electronics and semiconductor industries (see Antila et al, 2008;Cao and Subramaniam, 2013;Mok, 2009). Managerial implications for implementing those integrated models require a real-time visibility and control of operations, WIP, finished products inventory, products quality and inspection rate.…”

“…To achieve standardization and low cost, the productive equipments use automation and complex technologies and they are organized and sequenced according to the routing of the jobs, which makes the material flows continuously during the production process as in transfer and assembly lines (Kim and Lee, 1993;Blackstone, 2010). In practice, continuous sampling plans have been popularly employed in various industrial sectors where continuous production systems are used such as in electronics, automobile, military and food industries (see Anthony, 2004;Antila et al, 2008;Oprime and Ganga, 2013). The design of the first generation of continuous sampling plans as in Dodge (1943) and in the military standard MIL-STD-1235 series are purely based on quality criteria such as the Average Outgoing Quality Limit (AOQL), and completely neglect the economic impact of such designs.…”

Improving the performance of manufacturing systems with continuous sampling plans

“…Due to these advantages, continuous sampling plans have been used in various manufacturing industries; for example, floor beam production of the Boeing 777 aircraft (Hoppes, 1995), wafer fabrication lines of Intel Corporation (Anthony, 2004), functional boards of telecommunication products (Antila et al, 2008), etc. Driven by industrial needs, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to finding the best sampling plan to minimize inspection costs with satisfactory requirements on quality (Chen and Chou, 2003).…”