The effect of testing errors on a repetitive testing process

Repetitive testing is a fairly common practice in the final testing stage of a chip manufacturing. Decisions on setting initial lot size and the number of testing repetitions are crucial to the effectiveness of the testing process. The task of setting optimal parameters for a testing process is often difficult in practical situations due to uncertainties in both incoming product yield and testing equipment condition during the testing process. In this paper, we investigate a repetitive testing process where the testing equipment may shift randomly from an in-control state to an inferior state during the testing process which, correspondingly, results in different testing errors. We develop a quantitative model that helps us to find optimal test parameters that maximizes system performance. Based on the model, we performed extensive numerical experiments to test the effects of incoming product defective rate, testing equipment shift rate, especially, type II testing errors on decision and system performance. We find that test equipment condition may significantly affect the optimal decisions on the number of test repetitive and initial testing batch size. Further, we find that, while a small type II testing error may have negligible negative effect of system performance, the effect increases as the error or the incoming product yield increases. The results of this research may potentially provide practitioners with insights and a quantitative tool for designing an efficient repetitive testing process.