A good example of how to use 40 Inventive Principles for ideas generation.

The project aims to analyze the washing, drying, and ironing of clothes. Use Process Functional Modeling for the analysis. This is an example of how to use Process Functional Modeling and see this tool's power.

Semiconductor devices are becoming more complex and expensive. But what exactly are we paying for when we buy a computer, cellphone, or any device containing a microchip? It’s not for radically new functions—the core components remain the same: transistors and interconnections. According to Moore’s law, transistors are getting smaller, with more interconnection layers added, making the manufacturing process longer and more costly. In reality, we’re paying for the inability of engineers to efficiently solve engineering challenges. This project leverages System Functional Modeling (SFM) to analyze the IC interconnection layer and Process Functional Modeling (PFM) to evaluate its manufacturing process. These analyses aim to deepen our understanding of both the device and the production process, generating innovative solutions for cost reduction and improved efficiency.

In our company, the CI/CD processes are very long (over 2 hours). Since this is a blocking step in the release flow it causes holdups of our fast-paced releases. Eventually, we are getting a backlog of unreleased features, which could be mitigated by releasing many things at once, but that comes with additional risks.

The project was dedicated to production yield improvement in microchip manufacturing. The bumps are created on the top of a wafer and used for the final test of all dies. Only good dies are taken for the packaging. All dies that fail the test will be scrapped. The process yield depends on the amount of "good" and "bad" dies. It was revealed that in some cases, the time between the end of the process and the final test impacts the yield. The longer the dwelling, the more dies fail the final test. If the dwelling exceeds hundreds of hours, the amount of failed dies becomes dramatically high, which results in the scrapping of the whole wafer. The problem was analyzed and solved.