Performance assessment of processing and delivery times for very large scale integration using process capability indices

Abstract

Process quality and delivery time have received increasing attention in the highly competitive electronics industry. Many studies have proposed process capability indices (PCIs) to assess process effectiveness. However, methods to assess the performance in terms of processing and delivery times of products have seldom been discussed. The conventional PCIs can no longer assess the processing time (PT) and delivery time (DT) performance objectively or identify the relationship between PCIs and the non-conformance rate of PT or the conformance rate of DT. Lacking an effective performance index or an objective testing procedure to assess process/product performance will lead to inefficiency or a high manufacturing management overhead cost. Therefore, this study offers effective performance indices (i.e., PCIs) to assess the PT and DT performance for very large scale integration (VLSI). The uniformly minimum variance unbiased (UMVU) estimators of the proposed PCIs are derived under the assumption of a normal process distribution. The PCI estimators are then employed to construct a one-to-one relationship between the PCIs and the conformance rate of DT or non-conformance rate of PT, respectively. Finally, hypothesis testing procedures for the proposed PCIs are also developed. The testing procedure can be used to determine whether DT or PT can satisfy a customer's requirements.