Interview Story - Time You Failed

As a process engineer at Northwave, my team and I were challenged to reconfigure an equipment layout on the floor for a Wafer tester to dock to a new kind of handler, with little or no capital cost.

We put our heads together and were able to come up with a design that was built around the tester staying in its current location. I made up the necessary drawings, submitted them for review, and executed them after the drawing was approved. The only project cost came from installing the new type of handler.

Upon installation, a hardware design engineer came out to use the tool before it was released to our customer. He noticed that “Pin 1” orientation had flipped. This was due to the test head being rolled over to dock up. Unfortunately, this was a feature that was overlooked completely. We now needed to redesign the layout which did cause the tester to be moved. The tester was moved, and this added $20,000 to the project.

The lesson learned here was to make sure all parties (including hardware design) are in the approval loop for any project that involves their team.