No, actually. His point (one) was that startups don't do any good if they manufacture offshore. That exports jobs and technology both, since the technology gets refined over time (with experience).
If you have a failure rate of 0.1 % on simple parts like diodes and transistors, you have such process control problems that is time for a major line stop and overhaul to find/fix the problem(s). =20 If you are talking about things like x86 processors 0.1 % failure rate is probably ok. Functional parts are speed graded based on wafer tests. Or so says my ex-Intel friends.
=46or the HS 601 program at that time. Not memories, maybe processors = (but i think maybe not), not SSI, not discretes, not passives. Statistical = Lot Accptance Testing on everything; and they did test the living shit out of those parts. I didn't see any vacuum devices though.
Well, maybe 10% would justify a serious process overhaul.
Over 50% failure rate is common on high-end digital ICs. I've heard of
90% in early production. It's not easy to get a billion transistors right, fabbing features a fifth of a wavelength wide. The fundamental idea of semiconductor economics is to fab lots of parts on a wafer and test, test to find the good ones.
Wait! JAX-TX parts are burned in. So what's the benefit of burning in and temperature cycling parts if they are never tested? How does that improve reliability?
The level of error on the P-E mirror could have been caught by the kinds of tests that amateur home mirror grinders use. Or they could have tried to make an image of a real or simulated star. Kodak did it right. The problem wasn't cost; they used a very expensive state-of-the-art laser test system, but they used it wrong. The problem was arrogance.
One doesn't get counterfeits from a major, authorized distributor. Maxim parts are mostly sole-source by design, and they aren't very good about ensuring a steady supply, so people are forced to go to brokers.
So, design in multi-sourced parts and buy from authorized disties.
50% was pretty good on some products I worked on. Early on in a process node, productivity was often measured in wafers per good die. At 10% they'd have a sellable product.
It's helpful to read datasheets. Something like a cheap opamp or TinyLogic gate will usually have tiny footnotes that say that some parameters (like pin capacitances) are *not* tested on every part. And some parameters, like leakage currents, are spec'd three or even six orders of magnitude above typical values, because that saves milliseconds on the test machines.
The Agilent 34401A DVM design is interesting. It's a multi-slope ADC that uses cheap HC4066-type analog switches everywhere. If any of those parts has a thousandth of the datasheet leakage, it wouldn't work.
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