SMART Microsystems’ William Boyce Discusses “Development vs. Production, a Paradigm
Shift in Thinking” in the Fall Issue of the MEPTEC Report
For most new product development organizations, development and production should go hand in hand. Products should move seamlessly from concept to prototype, to production representative, and finally to production. At least that is the goal. The challenge is in making sure that the transition is seamless, and that is often the biggest hurdle. During the product development cycle, the focus is primarily on ensuring the product meets or exceeds the minimum customer design requirements and that the design is also manufacturable. At some point, the product needs to be released for production, and this is the transition point at which we sometimes stumble as an organization if we are not properly prepared.
SMART Microsystems’ William Boyce Discusses “Life Test for Product Qualification” in the Summer Issue of the MEPTEC Report
In a previously published article “Environmental Test Strategies for New Product Development”, the design of testing strategies for a successful product launch was discussed. But several readers pointed out that article neglected to highlight the purpose and goals of life test in general. The purpose of conducting “life test” on a product planned for or in production is simple—life testing is intended to simulate at an accelerated pace the conditions that the product is likely to experience when it is placed in service. The challenge is to simulate life conditions and conduct the testing in the shortest period of time possible to achieve production launch. For example, if the part is designed to survive a minimum of 5 years in service exposed to adverse conditions under the chassis of a heavy truck, a test must be designed to meet production launch of less than a year but simulate five years of adverse real-life conditions that the product would experience.
SMART Microsystems’ William Boyce Discusses “The Concept and Practice of “Concurrent Engineering” in the Spring Issue of the MEPTEC Report
A lot has been said over the years of the concept of concurrent engineering. There are courses available at engineering colleges and universities that delve into the value of the practice of concurrent engineering. Sometimes it goes by “simultaneous engineering” or “integrated product development (IPD)”, but they all refer to the same basic practice. To some, the concept of concurrent engineering implies that once the design is “frozen”, the design engineers can engage with the process engineers to begin the task of designing the process to produce the product as designed. To others, it implies that the design engineers have gained input from other engineering groups. To us at SMART Microsystems, it means having a complete team approach from the very beginning of the product design until the product launches.
SMART Microsystems’ William Boyce Discusses “Destructive Wire Bond Pull Testing and Its Purpose” in the Fall Issue of the MEPTEC Report
In the previous article, destructive wire bond shear testing was discussed. In this article we will discuss the practice and purpose of the destructive wire bond pull test. The reason that we chose to discuss wire bond pull testing after examining shear testing is that, in concurrence with the development process of a wire bond, we perform pull testing only after shear testing has been performed. The destructive pull test is explicitly what it sounds like. A wire bond loop is pulled until it fails in one of three ways: bond lift, heel break, or mid-span break. The pull test measures the force required to break the wire from tensile force, and the remnants of the wire bond are used to determine the failure mode. Typically used to develop the wire bond process, destructive pull testing is also used as a statistical process control in production bonding.
