The manufacturing of electronic products expects a great deal from the technological procedures
and processes.
The increasing diversity of products in connection with a decreasing product life time leads to flexible production processes. In addition to that quality management plays a more and more important role, especially due to the extending range of functionality of the electronic products. The scale of integration of electronic components will be increased too in future. Miniaturization of components and modules has caused a transition from precision technology to micro technology and will lead within the next years to nano technology.
All these developments influence the production. Production systems become complex and sometimes very sensitive systems themselves and only can be stabilized by a process control. For new products with not yet fully developed technologies the so called process window is very small. Technological know how can have a strategic significance for an enterprise to control processes.
In correlation with that development during the last decades a new scientific field in research and education was born, the field of process technology of electronics. A number of singular problems, questions and tasks now can be brought together to the whole. Also the amount of methods with successful solutions forms a basis that seems to let it be reasonable to be published in a whole, especially because the usability of these methods has been proved by practical results. In this book the specific characteristics of electronics production will be taken under consideration, but an adaptation to other fields is possible as well.
A very specific characteristic of electronics production is the large number of test processes to recognize or be able to recognize failures immediately after their origin. That leads to the question: Should these failures immediately be recognized and repaired (respectively the product rejected) or should this decision be made later, which means after the next or after some next process steps. This is a typical question in electronics production.
Another question concerns to systems theory. Already 80 years ago systems theory was introduced to electrical engineering. Operational calculus onto the so called “symbolic methods” has been proved to be efficient tools to calculate electrical networks and circuits. It can be shown that the same methods can be used to analyze production processes by which also an interesting connection to reliability theory is recognizable.
The analysis of the structure, the separation of a system into its elements, the theory of flow graphs and the operational calculus allow new procedures of analysis and synthesis in process technology. It has to be mentioned that the probability theory and methods of mathematical statistics are necessary for most of the models. Also they only can be interpreted based on the mathematical item random variable and the concerning mathematical methods.