Focus groups: impact of quality and process capability factors on the silicon wafer slicing process

Silicon wafer slicing is a highly complex manufacturing process, complicating efforts to monitor individual product type process stability and quality control effectively. Specifically, silicon wafer slicing involves multiple quality characteristics that occur synchronously. However, quantitative methods, such as process capability indices (PCIs) and statistical process control (SPC) charts, for monitoring slicing problems are limited. Therefore, this study presents a focus group procedure that explores engineering knowledge and expertise. Organisations can use focus groups to create knowledge of stable processes, optimal settings and quality control. Interactive discussions indicate that focus groups can improve productivity and decision making effectiveness either by accelerating the decision making or by increasing decision quality. Moreover, the proposed procedure enables an engineer to rapidly adjust a manufacturing system to eliminate problems related to slicing process instability phenomena and improve slicing quality and process capability. Finally, the SPC chart and the exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart are presented to demonstrate and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods.