Looking for that breakthrough

2016 has ushered a new aspiration on my behalf, as an engineer it has always been my goal and aim to achieve a breakthrough something that i believe all engineers should aspire to, looking at the problem that we have in our process it has always been my goal that i can achieve a major reduction in our particle problem in our IMD layer tools, we have received feedback from our tool supplier that the low gas flow region that we are running at is susceptible to high particle formation, from there on i have set to optimize the process by running at a higher gas flow, but the problem that i have is after running a few runs it is very difficult to statistically show that a higher gas flow provides a better process in terms of particle performance. So for 2016 i would set a goal to setup a method on how to quantify a process that has a better particle performance process

Challenges in wafer count and equipment correlation analysis

I have given myself a task of looking into the possibility of correlating the failure particles in our processing chambers with the number of wafers the equipment has processed, using a standard one way analysis shows that they is no coherent correlation between the two, when i actually review again the chart i do realized that there might be some factors that actually masked the analysis that was made.

1) The number of cycles each pm has gone through in the analysis of the equipment, when we do not consider this in our analysis what actually transpired is that we might assume that a repeating failure in a single pm cycles masks away the subsequent pm cycles correlation

2) Certain failure within a certain pm cycles might in effect contributed by another pm failure which might also mask the relevance of the analysis for that particular pm type

3) A repeating failure might actually indicates a catastrophic failure instead of giving you the actual lifetime of the pm itself

These are some of the things that came across my mind at this time

I will share further when i manage to have a better intepretation of the data at hand

A beginning

After graduating from a local university back in 2003, i was fortunate enough to be offered a job in a semiconductor company in a northern region. From there on i have worked in the same company and the same department since. Through the 12 years that i have been here, i have seen the ups and down of the volatile market in the semiconductor industry, the company so far has provided me with ample of oppurtunity for me to progress further acquiring new knowledge and enhancing my skill as an engineer, no one i guess would have thought that the volatile market in the electronic industry could eventually be felt by the oil and gas industry, this industry which was so often than not was considered the most sought after place to work with, due to its high paying salary and allowances. So here i am being in a wafer fabrication facility and focusing on dielectric department. The reason that i was thinking about blogging about my life's experience as an engineer with the hope that eventually someone out there might benefit from the things that i'm going to write and share

The journey has begun

The first step towards something bigger