***OT***The following comments are based on more than ten years of engineering experience in the semiconductor equipment industry. I have seen situations where the reliability was too low, and had to be addressed in a crash program. I have also seen design projects where sufficient resources were applied in the first place, such that a much higher quality product introduction was achieved.
The problem with the "quality is free" mantra is that it takes time and effort to create more reliable designs. The problem with the "do it right the first time" mantra is that it's not necessarily a case of some bone-headed engineer making some dumb mistake, but more often a case that the best design doesn't necessarily occur to an engineer the first time. There are also time to market pressures to consider, which often lead to a higher priority being given to bringing an engineering project in on time than coming up with the absolute best design. These are a result of competitive market forces which will not be eliminated by the latest "total quality" fad.
If a fab could get a piece of equipment that had twice the mean time between failures, but the cost was four times as much, would it be worth it? Maybe so, maybe not, but that would be a decision for the fab manager to make. The point is that there must eventually come a point where the cost of additional reliability exceeds the additional economic benefit of that reliability. If you doubt this, just start buying everything to Mil Spec and see what happens. There IS an optimum trade-off between reliability and cost at any point in time, and the ability of private industry to recognize and seek that optimum is one of the things that sets it off from the military and their famous $900 toilet seats. Maybe Murphy is really saying that he doesn't think the industry has reached the optimum point yet, and if so, he could be right. But when he talks as if very low volume manufacturers can easily afford to achieve the level of reliability of very high volume manufacturers, he proves that he doesn't know what he is talking about. |
