jms_embedded
Well-known member
Assembly houses are fine-tuning their methodologies and processes for automotive ICs, optimizing everything from inspection and metrology to data management in order to prevent escapes and reduce the number of costly returns.
Today, assembly defects account for between 12% and 15% of semiconductor customer returns in the automotive chip market. As component counts in vehicles climb from the hundreds to the thousands, and quality targets shift from 10 dppm to 10 dppb, assembly engineers need to find practical means of delivering zero defective parts. Doing so puts greater demands on various process steps, including, metrology, inspection and test.
While semiconductor test engineers are making great strides on isolating fab-generated defects, assembly engineers are quietly focusing attention on improving inspection and processing of equipment data to catch latent defects. This is a big deal for automotive electronics. According to a BMW presentation at the 2017 Automotive Electronics Council reliability workshop, most semiconductor devices fail within the car’s warranty period.
The carmaker noted that 22% of warranty costs are due to electronics and electrical control units. Of those failed parts, BMW said 77% of the failures are semiconductor devices, and 23% of the parts are isolated to active and passive components. Of those semiconductor failures, 48% were due to systematic fails, 24% to test coverage, 15% to random failures, and 6% were retested and did not fail the second time. The failure pareto was also broken down to 41% final test, 24% front-end processing, 22% design, and 12% assembly.
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