Process Quality Management and Multiple Response Design Models for the Manufacture of Semiconductors

This chapter addresses quality management (QM) content on the process quality management (PQM) level in the high-technology industry of semiconductor manufacturing. Identifying critical components of a manufacturing or service process and improving them to ensure superior quality at economic costs is the overall goal of PQM. Deming was a prominent proponent of PQM as a means to optimize the performance of a product or process. In optimizing the performance of a product or process, good design practices require the evaluation of designs from a process perspective. Advanced design techniques, namely design of experiments (DOEs), are cornerstone to the optimization process, to design management, and in turn to PQM. This chapter investigates the use of DOEs in the manufacture of semiconductors. Specifically, two underlying assumptions impact operations managers using DOEs: solution differences/similarities in underlying DOE optimization methods and marginal rates of substitution. Perhaps unknown to the user, DOE optimization techniques carry strong assumptions regarding these characteristics. This chapter investigates two commonly used DOE optimization approaches applied to the operational control of semiconductor wafer production, and demonstrates that each method contains assumptions about these characteristics, which are not intuitively evident to a user.