“It comes down to quality and yield”

EM Asia: When electronics manufacturers evaluate programming strategies, what are the key factors they should consider?

Hirsch: Manufacturers usually care about cost and throughput. They want to get as many devices made per day at the lowest cost, so when you are evaluating your programming strategy, you have to look at all of the issues that affect the number of devices that come out at the end of the day. It’s not just the speed of the equipment, but also the yield. If you use regular sockets, for example, you’re going to get some fallout but if you use more expensive sockets, your yield will go up which means less scrap and overall, you’ll have a better result.

EM Asia: What are the common causes of programming failures?

Hirsch: Very rarely is programming failure due to bad silicon. It’s almost always due to operator training, dirty sockets, wrong block scheme, etc. so the quality process that you wrap around your line will have a big difference on programming failure. Right now, a lot of semiconductor companies will take parts back from manufacturers but things are changing. Flash semiconductors’ ASPs are dropping—becoming less profitable— so these companies need to start paying much closer attention to RMAs (Return Merchandise Authorizations).

EM Asia: Automated programming can be a costly investment. But higher scraps from manual programming can be significant too. Which to choose?

Hirsch: Automated investment is actually not that huge when you look at cost savings in terms of return on investment (ROI). In manual programming, when you pick up the device and place it in the socket, there is a chance to bump it, bend it or drop it. So what it comes down to is quality and yield. While you can achieve the same total number of potential throughput with manual programming, your yield is going to be lower due to quality issues.

If you take a look at the different types of automated equipment we offer, we have one that mounts on a SMT line, and it takes parts off of a tape. It peels the tape back, pulls the part out, puts it in the socket, programs it, puts it on a belt, the belt moves forward, and it is presented to the placement machine. The placement machine grabs it as soon as it’s been programmed and places it on the PCB.

So think about that—we just programmed the device, read it back and verified that it was good. We then pull it out of the socket, which actually improves the coplanarity of the tin because it actually goes in a highquality top socket, and then it goes to SMT a few seconds later. If you program these devices offline and put them in inventory, there is a possibility of giving them the wrong code, with the wrong part number or for things to happen to them mechanically. We’ve had customers who’ve shipped parts cross-country, and there was so much vibration in the truck, they wore off the plating.

EM Asia: How do you see the dynamics of the electronics industry?

Hirsch:There are lots of changes in the industry right now, lots of dynamics in terms of types of memory being used, and a big increase in the use of flash media. There’s sort of a collision between technologies. What I mean is this: You can pull a flash media card out of your phone and put it in your computer. So now these two devices are bridged. And that brings special challenges for the community. The multimedia association just ratified a new form factor for yet another smaller type of card. And these are all vying to go into mobile devices.

So it’s a very interesting time for our company as some of these devices will need to have content preloaded on them. Digital rights management is going to be complicated. When someone comes and hands you a flash media card and says, “Can you help us duplicate this?” And it’s got some protected content, how do you do that? How do you copy a key that’s meant to be copyrighted? There are some interesting times ahead.