Time for another philosophical rumination on the value of what we do...

In my day job, I work for a test lab group that supports an in-house chip fab. Being a US national lab, that fab gets all kinds of trick projects thrown at it from MEMS mixed with high-speed CMOS to stackable laser multichips. As such, no two lots in a row run the same processes. Sometimes, no two wafers in a row are the same!

This means that controlling the yield is an almost insurmountable problem, because the keys to yield improvement are consistency and measurement feedback. Our situation is completely different than, say, Intel's plant up in Rio Rancho, where an entire fab line will build one chip and one chip only for years.

I have started doing work for the fab's people directly, and a week's work gave me a complete web/mysql app that made 15000+ files of measurement data available either as a table or a spreadsheet. The Fab's manager was utterly blown away, and effusive in his praise. Now, you and I know that Perl, Apache, and MySQL really make this no great shakes (I use Embperl as my templating/integration system). I had to calm this manager down, and explain to him that this work was really no more than hammering nails is to a journeyman carpenter. He laughed, and said that what I'd done in a week was going to save his process engineers several hours every single day, just for this one tester. Needless to say, my next task is to adapt this same little system to half a dozen other fab process test machines, and the time savings will be multiplied because they are just as critical.

The next thing we did was to talk about building a data warehouse to house all the data from all the process stations with a few interns to help me with the grunt coding. He kept looking at me like he was trying to see if I'd get nervous, but I was just smiling as I led him through the concepts involved in building layers of meta-tables in the database to describe varying dataset structures in a generalized way. I must say, he looked like he couldn't decide whether he'd won the lottery or ascended to his personal heaven.

Finally, after I'd answered all his questions and was sitting there waiting for him to say something more, he couldn't. He was wrestling with disbelief and hope, and nothing came out.

I nodded with a smile. "Okay, so now we're hammering together some trusses to keep your fab dry when it rains." :D

In reply to Just hammering nails... by samizdat

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