Case Analysis: General Microelectronic, Incorporated: Semiconductor Assembly Process Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Case Analysis: General Microelectronic, Incorporated: Semiconductor Assembly Process Case Solution

1.1 General Microelectronic

General Microelectronic was founded in 1968. The company designed and supplied a vast range of digital and analog mixed signal semiconductor which was used to support communication applications. In addition, the headquarters of the company was in United Kingdom and it was operating its business in United States, Germany, and Singapore.

However, the backbone of this business was wireless, as it was providing the company almost 45% of the business and the company had a great reputation and market image in this segment. In addition to this, SBU was providing chips for voice, data signaling, and radio frequency applications.

On the other hand, memory management application accounted for an additional 36%. On the other hand, the revenue was approximately $30 million. Furthermore, the company was performing tests and operations onits semiconductors in-house, while it outsourced theproduction of silicon wafer.

Finally, it can be seen that the GME’s mainactivity was contract assembly. However, as contract assembler, it received a semiconductor wafer, or chips from its customers. Afterwards, it assembled them, packaged them and finally, finished them after electrical testing.

1.2 Statement of Problem

The company recently purchased a new wire-bonder machine to increase production and assembling capacity. However, it can be seen that the company intended to increase its overall performance and to increase the volume of assembling to achieve profit maximization. After the installation of new machine, the productivity and overall volume increased. However, this increase lasted for two months as the machine just added excess capacity for the first two months. Afterwards, the performance of the machine started to decline.

Nevertheless, the machine added capacity, the quality of the final product decreased after the first two months and even the quality of the final product declined to quality levels that were unacceptable and the final solution was to discard the machine or to find new ways to solve this problem on urgent basis.

As a solution, the company started to test the performance of the machine and decided to take out data of production for four months. Afterwards, the technicians randomly selected one of the six dyes every day from the production lot. Then the technicians randomly picked two wires at the end of the selected dye. Moreover, two out of six wires on the both sides of the die were chosen to complete this statistical test. However, the above test gave an overall 8 number of observations a day. (2 wires * 4 sides = 8 observations).

Finally, this effort was acceptable to solve the problem but the company faced several problems in the test as well. Since, the findings revealed that the machine was producing approximately 8% defective goods and were not able to sell them in the market. This issue was increasing the operational cost of the company and the firm had to waste those defective products.

2 SPC Diagram

The SPC Diagram in exhibit 6 shows that the company took 126 samples, which also included 8 observations per sample. Afterwards, the sample mean and the sample range of samples were calculated on the graph and pull strength of the process was on the left hand side. However, the mean of samples shows that the majority of all samples are fulfilling the 7-gram requirements of the company while there are numerous samples, which are lacking behind this criterion (80 samples). However, the total sample consists of 1008 samples (126*8). Furthermore, the overall calculation can be seen in appendix 2. In addition, there are almost 7.94% samples which are lacking in the 7 gram criterion................

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