Hi-Tech Equipment Reliability: A Practical Guide for Engineers and the Engineering Managers

Today's highly competitive, global marketplace demands an optimum level of equipment reliability. To achieve world-class reliability, everyone in an organization must participate or have adequate knowledge of the reliability discipline. This book, first of its kind, is a guidebook to the reliability discipline for design, manufacturing and service engineers, management and others who can actively contribute to equipment reliability. Dr. Dhudshia's book was the result of a lecture series developed at SEMATECH while on assignment from Texas Instruments.

Reliability has been widely used to measure equipment performance in military and commercial industry since the early 1940s. Movement to track high-level matrices, such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness or Cost of Ownership, are more recent developments. Since all such matrices rely heavily on a reliability metric, they do not dilute importance of the reliability discipline, on the contrary, they enhance it.

Today's highly competitive, global market environment demands an optimum level of reliability in present and future products/equipment. Customers expect and, in some cases, competitors force a high reliability level from manufacturing organizations. At the same time, the complexity of most equipment is continuously increasing. These influences are driving ever-higher reliability modules and components just to maintain the same reliability level.

To make a reliability improvement program effective and achieve a world-class reliability level, everyone in the organization - not just the reliability engineer - must play his or her part. Usually, however, not everyone is equipped with adequate knowledge of the discipline to play the part effectively. Reliability engineers understand the implications of this trend. An abundance of available textbooks, military handbooks, standards, and guidebooks use high-level mathematics and statistical theory to help define and clarify reliability discipline for reliability engineers. However, this reliability discipline needs to be understood and applied by everyone in an organization, not just reliability engineers.

Hi-Tech Equipment Reliability targets design, manufacturing, and service engineers, management, purchasing staff, and all others within an organization who can actively contribute product/equipment reliability. Great emphasis is placed on gaining a basic working knowledge of reliability discipline and understanding the basic phases of a reliability improvement program throughout a product's development life cycle. Examples from actual industry experience enhance the usefulness of the topic.

This book focuses on equipment reliability for the semiconductor manufacturing industry; however, the material presented can be applied to any product of equipment line. Some knowledge of mathematics would be helpful but is not absolutely necessary to understand the subject matter.

This book will not make a reliability engineer out of you. It will, however, help you become a knowledgeable partner with reliability engineers and others within your organization to help your company reach its reliability goals.

The content of this book is based on my life experiences during my association with SEMATECH as an assignee from Texas Instruments, Inc. First helping semiconductor manufacturing equipment suppliers implement reliability improvement programs and, second, developing and teaching a class entitled Equipment Reliability Overview for Design and manufacturing, Field Engineers, Purchasing personnel, and Project and Program Managers to the same suppliers. The knowledge I gained during the above interactions is included in this book.

I would like to thank Texas Instruments Inc., for allowing me to serve SEMATECH and for permitting me to share my work in book form. In addition, I would like to thank SEMATECH for giving me an opportunity to work on the subject matter and for permitting me to write this book. This acknowledgement is not complete without thanking staff members of the External Total Quality and Reliability group at SEMATECH, who have helped me to continuously improve the subject matter.

I am also deeply indebted to Sheila Endres and Ken Griger for their editorial assistance in preparing the manuscript.

Finally, I offer my sincere gratitude to Lanchester Press Inc. for encouragement to publish this book and for all their kind publishing assistance.