RADAR AMPLIFIERS YIELD INCREASE

As a young quality engineer new to the company Steve was assigned to the biggest problem project, a microwave amplifier for a shipboard radar system. The design was a caseless microcircuit meaning there was no protection for the delicate wires and components. The engineers had not solved the problem of tuning it into the required bandwidth without marring the gold plated circuitry. The yield was effectively zero.

The first task was to screen the work-in-progress for acceptable quality. As a new employee Steve was on the spot when he determined that none of the current product was salvageable. He recommended scrapping and starting over with new amplifiers. As engineering was able to find a repeatable tuning process using the scrapped units, assembly and quality were able to set standards, build fixturing for better handling, and build acceptable amplifiers. Steve reported the yields daily to the VP in charge. In a matter of weeks the yields climbed to 50%, then 80% and eventually 99+%.

Lessons learned helped propel Steve to higher levels of quality management eventually reaching the level of Division Director of Quality over three manufacturing plants of a major defense contractor.