Philips Semiconductors General Quality TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT PRODUCT CONFORMANCE Philips Semiconductors is a Quality Company, renowned for the high quality of our products and service. We keep alive this tradition by constantly aiming towards one ultimate standard, that of zero defects. This aim is guided by our Total Quality Management (TQM) system, the basis of which is described in the following paragraphs. The assurance of product conformance is an integral part of our quality assurance (QA) practice. This is achieved by: * Incoming material management through partnerships with suppliers. * In-line quality assurance to monitor process reproducibility during manufacture and initiate any necessary corrective action. Critical process steps are 100% under statistical process control. Quality assurance Based on ISO 9000 standards, customer standards such as Ford TQE and IBM MDQ. Our factories are certified to ISO 9000 by external inspectorates. * Acceptance tests on finished products to verify conformance with the device specification. The test results are used for quality feedback and corrective actions. The inspection and test requirements are detailed in the general quality specifications. Partnerships with customers PPM co-operations, design-in agreements, ship-to-stock, just-in-time and self-qualification programmes, and application support. * Periodic inspections to monitor and measure the conformance of products. Partnerships with suppliers PRODUCT RELIABILITY Ship-to-stock, statistical process control and ISO 9000 audits. Continuous process and system improvement, design improvement, complete use of statistical process control, realization of our final objective of zero defects, and logistics improvement by ship-to-stock and just-in-time agreements. With the increasing complexity of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) equipment, component reliability must be extremely high. Our research laboratories and development departments study the failure mechanisms of semiconductors. Their studies result in design rules and process optimization for the highest built-in product reliability. Highly accelerated tests are applied to the products reliability evaluation. Rejects from reliability tests and from customer complaints are submitted to failure analysis, to result in corrective action. ADVANCED QUALITY PLANNING CUSTOMER RESPONSES During the design and development of new products and processes, quality is built-in by advanced quality planning. Through failure-mode-and-effect analysis the critical parameters are detected and measures taken to ensure good performance on these parameters. The capability of process steps is also planned in this phase. Our quality improvement depends on joint action with our customer. We need our customer's inputs and we invite constructive comments on all aspects of our performance. Please contact our local sales representative. Quality improvement programme RECOGNITION The high quality of our products and services is demonstrated by many Quality Awards granted by major customers and international organizations. 1995 Mar 21 38