QFD implementation in a discrete semiconductor industry

Abstract

Semiconductor manufacturers seek to improve the quality and reliability of their products while reducing costs and decreasing production time to enhance its competitiveness. There are so many factors involved that can make or break a company in this fast paced world where companies have to aggressively meet new demands, especially from the customers because they are the ultimate evaluator of the company's product. One therefore needs a way to integrate 'customer voices' in this costly production process as it is essential for the component manufacturers and vendors to know precisely what their customer wants and expects in a device so that they can meet their needs. With the application on the power rectifier, this work illustrates how QFD can help the power device vendors and manufacturers to achieve greater customer satisfaction through supplying a better quality and more reliable product. The completed functional QFD matrix allows the manufacturer to identify the most critical need from the customer that corresponded to the key technical requirements. This helps the manufacturer to focus its attention on the more important customer needs. The completed reliability QFD matrix together with the FMECA analysis helps the manufacturer to consider the reliability demands from its customer. Integrating both the QFD and FMECA charts helps to identify the most critical failure modes and its associated failure mechanisms. Finally, a spreadsheet implementation to generate the QFD and FMECA matrices have been created to reduce the cumbersome process of the numerous manual recordings.