[For this blog, I have invited John Latimer, a director of world-wide customer quality engineering, to provide us with a view of our philosophy in how we are improving our quality.  What I find unique to Xilinx is that we recognize that in order to improve quality, we need to actively seek out, and cooperate with our customers’ quality organizations.  Here follows John’s blog:
       Austin Lesea]

Helping the Customer Drive to ‘Zero Defects’

Xilinx has been committed with its customers to drive towards defect elimination in customer applications. To achieve this often takes a level of focus and partnership which many customers are unable to achieve. However, the benefits can be extreme. In one example, Xilinx has now shipped over 9 million units with 0 parts per million (ppm) defect levels into a high volume consumer application.

Achieving ‘zero defects’ is a two-way street: commitment on both sides is required.

Other customers have achieved similar results.

[see image 1]

These happy customers have three things in common to create these kinds of successful results:

1) Working early and cooperatively during the development process
2) Properly accounting for Xilinx manufacturing variability during customer qualifications (talk to us!)
3) Working as a team with customers and contract manufacturers (CM’s) to drive quick diagnosis during manufacturing to resolve manufacturing issues


To drive this further, Xilinx has developed and made available specific quality related training to aid in the design process.

* Online training focused on improving design margin
* FPGA Design Quality Checklists to avoid common mistakes
* FAE support to drive best known methods

[see image 2]

To help customers improve the robustness of their qualification efforts, Xilinx can now make available manufacturing process corner material to better qualify customer designs.
 
Note:  To see if you qualify for this program, you should contact the Xilinx quality team, through your FAE or distributor.

Lastly, Xilinx has been working closely with contract manufacturers to reduce and eliminate inline manufacturing issues. To do this successfully, the Xilinx Customer Quality teams around the world works with the customer to understand their troubleshooting capabilities, signature analysis, and common manufacturing issues (like electrical over stress damage) and apply this knowledge to improve our quality. 

To be truly successful, these efforts all need the support of our customers to reach zero defects.

Xilinx is committed to solving customer issues. We continue to make progress with customers who are interested in driving toward defect free experiences using our products, because their success is our success.

John Latimer