Quality Control

While a design may be qualified and in production, there are innumerable things that may affect quality and reliability of products. Minute changes in the production line can lead to catastrophic failures and millions of dollars of wasted hardware and resources. At Sage Analytical Laboratories we can help with quality control of your devices before they end up causing issues in production, or to help you get your manufacturing up to specification.

Often times, for high reliability applications such as military, automotive, and aerospace devices must be put through very heavy testing and inspection to match the rigorous specifications demanded. A counterfeit device, or a missed inspection point could cause a potentially life threatening failure, not to mention heavy industry scrutiny and damage to reputation. There are many different techniques to directly or indirectly decide a device’s quality such as:

• Random destructive lot testing
• Package integrity inspection
• Counterfeit detection
• Electrical comparison/characterization
• Full per-device non-destructive quality analysis
• X-ray validation
• Random cross-section device level thickness measurements
• Decapsulation and optical/SEM inspection
• Physical device marking comparison to datasheets

…and many more varieties of process quality control.

Times when quality control and evaluation are essential:

• New circuit design
• Implementing new process steps
• Early production hardware
• High fallout
• Yield learning
• Periodic monitoring
• Performance degrade

If your process is undergoing any changes, or unusual fallout is observed, Sage Analytical Laboratories is here to provide unbiased, independent analysis of the products being sold. This is beneficial for both the supplier and the consumer. For the supplier, quality control helps guarantee that any issues caused by mishandling, faulty connections, or other stresses are attributed to the source, and not at faulty hardware construction. For the consumer, the only way to be sure you’re getting what you pay for is to periodically monitor quality on the products you’re using.