GALAXY BLOG

One of my jobs during college was computer support for a government contracted agency. I navigated a case to fix a networked printer and couldn’t find where this room was. I went back to some “old-timers” and asked them where it was. They smirked and said..”oh you’re going to that place”. One of them led me there and it was like a scene from a science fiction movie. We found a small door that led to underneath the parking garage. You’d never would know it was there if someone hadn’t led you straight through. We rang the bell and the person answered through a peep door like this one.

If I wasn’t yet feeling like a character in a movie by that point I definitely did after the 15 minutes of questioning that led us to the inside of the labyrinth. I did get the printer fixed but in this strange lab there was a hovering object that was clearly unidentified (at least by me). It was probably to this day the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. When I asked the user whose printer I was fixing what it was, he said “You’re on a need to know basis, and you don’t need to know”. Alrighty then. I think at that point I was just happy to get out of there without signing my life away.

We often get asked “how does someone know what’s been fixed or enhanced in Examinator”? We don’t blast these via email because we impliment new features so often you’d likely flag us as spam

Therefore we feel this is on a “need to know basis”, but you do need to know. Therefore we have provided this info to you through the help tab, then Release history. Now you are “in the know” and anytime you download a new version you can see what’s new since the last version you had.

Talk about that at the water cooler, and it will sound like you’re “in the know”!

- The Blogmeister -

Dan King

As the only girl on my high school chess team, I have had a lifelong interest in the game of chess.  I recently watched an interesting documentary about the great Bobby Fischer.   In 1957, Fischer became the youngest winner of the U.S. chess championship — he was just 14 — before going on to beat Spassky for the world title in 1972.  At the World Chess Championship of 1972, Fischer became the 11^th World Chess Champion in the “Match of the Century” against then world grandmaster Spassky.   Bobby had a recorded IQ of 187, higher than Albert Einstein’s and Mozart’s.   In his later years, he rarely played chess and many believed he suffered from Asperger’s disorder, schizophrenia, paranoid personality disorder and delusional disorder.

Many can argue whether he was a traitor to the US or not during the period of the “Cold War” when he was trying to defend his world chess champion title.  Additionally, Fischer was seen by much of the world as an arrogant and mean-spirited man because of a series of rankly anti-Semitic public utterances and his praise for the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.   But no one can argue that he was one of the greatest chess players of all time.  He was clearly an “outlier gone bad.”

While this may seem like an obvious connection to make, I can’t help but think about how significantly outliers affect the world – especially the world of semiconductors.  In the markets of medical, automotive, military and even consumer electronics, the detection and removal of outliers at wafer sort and final test can remove infant mortality escapes as well as improve yields and overall product quality while minimizing system failures and customer returns.  Semiconductor device outliers need to be detected and removed before they “go bad”.  On the other hand, human outliers need to be understood for their great achievements together with their potentially severe weaknesses.

To learn more about Galaxy’s outlier removal tools, go to: http://www.galaxysemi.com/patman/index.html

By Diane DuVall

So, you engineers in quality assurance have had fun these last two weeks…but did you really think I would forget you? You are so near and dear to my heart…making me rewrite my reports, increase my sample sizes for DOE, and insist on less than 30% values in my R&Rs. Oh, sweet QA Engineer, the heartburn you have caused. In my tribute to you, please enjoy the top 10 QA Holiday Pet Peaves.

10 –The sample pack of holiday cookies someone brought to the potluck has fewer than 22 cookies per type.

9 – People who think FMEA is a new enhancement to FM radio.

8 – Engineers who mis-use Cpk.

7 – Inter-quartile range is NOT the distance from which a quarter can be chucked at the head of the Admin’s singing and dancing Santa.

6 – ISO audits that run over holiday break for “minimum disruption of business”.

5 – Was there an assessment done on the scalability of holiday dinner before the cafeteria started cooking it for the whole company?

4 – People who think an “8D” is a code word for a water cooler violation going on. (We got an 8D over here!)

3 – Engineers who think lean six-sigma is what you get when your black-belt fits even after 6 pieces of pi.

2 – People who think the bathtub curve describes a part of the hazard model of too much eggnog.

1 – The “emergency” test release that MUST be done before the holiday break did not have an R&R run using the Galaxy Examinator Gage R&R Tool.

Now before you run off and calculate which fancy LED colors on your light string have more infant mortality failures and which have more early wear-out failures, take another look at the stats offered in Examinator. IQR, Mean shift, Cpl, Cph, reproducibility, skew, kurtosis, and so much more! Get them more quickly through Examinator using the native files directly from the testers.

Happy Holidays – Kate

The product engineers had their fun last week and now it is time for test engineers to have their part. Thank you to all my test engineering buddies who helped me put this together…you know who you are! The 12 days of a test engineer’s Christmas:

12 cups of coffee,

11 weekly meetings,

10 R&R samples,

9 validation blocks,

8-ty page specification,

7 bunny-suit pieces,

6 bent probe needles,

5 huuuuuuundred strooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooobes!

4 shattered wafers,

3 broken loadboards,

2 managers nagging, and

1 wafer probing too long!

Perhaps it’s time to leverage some test time reduction strategies…Pearson’s Correlation in Examinator can help you to determine what tests predict the performance of others. This information empowers you to move shorter tests to the beginning of the program so that longer, more detailed test are done only on parts that are most likely good. Additionally, this information might provide data for eliminating tests that bring no additional coverage. Check it out today in the more reports pull-down of the settings tab.

As we enter the holiday season, out comes the treats, the decorations, and the rush to finish things before holiday break. As you may know, I was a product engineer before I came to Galaxy and I spent much of my time in November and December making sure everything was marked HOT so that things would go smoothly for production over holiday break. So in the spirit of things, I would like to share with you a little holiday list.

You might be a product engineer if…

-          You wear mis-matched holiday socks for fun

-          You look forward to the holidays ‘cause you get to put together the kids’ toys

-          You think (like me) that this is cool: 

-          It goes without saying at your house that you will be the one to find the burnt-out bulb in the string (and if all the lights are re-arranged into a repeating pattern, that’s a known side effect of your brilliance)

-          At your spouse’s company’s holiday party, he/she explains what you do by saying that you “measure stuff, engineer things, and well, you know…”

-          You raid the reject bins from the production line to make decorations for the office holiday potluck

…and finally…You find it cool to decorate your cubical in red and green wafer maps in lieu of lights using the Galaxy wafer map export function to edit your maps and re-bin die according to your color preferences!

- Kate