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 | Tekmos Travels to the U.K.
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Welcome to Tekmos Talks August. Last month was a busy travel and production month with next promising the same. This month's newsletter will talk about travels to England to present a white paper and visit about a temporary fab closure. As always we will share Tekmos' "news highlights" of company activities and sales highlights, including the launch of new Tekmos products.
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From the Desk of the President
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 | Lynn Reed, President
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Plessey Fab Construction
We were previously informed that Plessey Semiconductor was going to be closing their fab for a 6 month period for construction. This warranted a trip to England to determine exactly what was happening.
Plessey Semiconductor has two fab lines: a 6 inch and an 8 inch line. Both are independent, but they share the same building, and there is an overlap in support equipment.
We started using this facility in 2004 when it was a part of X-Fab. X-Fab is a foundry, and at the time, this was their leading facility. Later, after X-Fab acquired 1st Silicon, this fab became redundant, and was sold to Plessey. Ironically, the fab was originally built by Plessey, though that corporate Plessey is not related to the current corporate Plessey.
While Plessey has continued to support foundry business, their main industry is an assortment of proprietary products, including high intensity LEDs. The LEDs are being manufactured in the 6 inch line. The 6 inch line was originally a CMOS line, and when it was converted into a GaN (Gallium Nitride) LED line, there were some equipment bottlenecks, particularly in the reactors necessary to produce GaN. So Plessey is shutting down the 6 inch line in order to upgrade it and to install several new GaN reactors.
This did not require shutting down the 8 inch fab. But since Plessey is primarily a standard product company, and since the 8 inch fab is not running at capacity, Plessey realized that if they ran at full capacity for 3 months, then they could put the 8 inch fab in "idle" mode while the 6 inch fab was shut down, and realize significant savings in utilities. And that is what they decided to do.
Obviously, this is not the optimum solution for foundry customers. In addition to requiring us to buy almost a year's worth of production, it also means that we cannot use this fab for the introduction of new products. And that is forcing us to develop a relationship with another foundry for our 0.35u parts.
One good piece of news from the trip was the understanding that there is no problem in resuming operation for the fab. We had originally been concerned that any construction delay might affect the restart date. Since the fabs are separate, then there is no risk of this happening.
For more information on inventory or orders, please contact Bob Abrams, Vice President of Sales & Development or call 512-342-9871
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Tekmos Quality Control
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From the Desk of Director of Operations
Comments on a Customer Audit, from the Tekmos perspective
There are many ways to view a quality audit. The most common would probably involve the gnashing of teeth and a howl of dismay. With the mournful sound, one might find various tactics utilized to try and hide any less than impressive information. There are the attempts to lead an auditor to "safe" zones within the company, or smothering the auditors with food and constant conversation to hopefully distract them from their mission. As a fallback, there is always the straight denial of a problem, or someone in management may simply point a finger at the person next to them when finally caught. Of course a surprised look is mandatory in these situations.
The problem with these and other similar tactics is that the core weaknesses are never truly fixed. The idea of continual improvement can only exist in an environment of honesty about a problem, coupled with a true curiosity as to the root cause and a desire to permanently correct it. A customer audit is perfect for this. These audit teams specialize in finding overlooked weakness in a system. They continually visit multiple companies in the same type of business and are excellent resources to find the best system practice utilized. This information is available through them to you without your competition even knowing, and as an added bonus, this is all done at virtually no cost.
The customer audits, along with useful suggestions for your business, are also much more intensive than a regular certification audit. The customer team actually has skin in the game and a vested interest in your company being the best partner for them that they can find.
Don't run from, but run toward customer audit opportunities. They are the best low cost resource to help find, advice on and fix potential weakness in a system. And in the end, isn't that in the best interest of everyone anyway.
Jon Gehm
For more information about Quality Control....
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Tekmos Travels to the UK
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I attended the HiTen conference at Oxford. I was presenting a paper, and I wanted to see what others were presenting. The conference was good, and I came away with a number of ideas, including some that I think will improve our data retention for non-volatile EEPROM memories at high temperature.
The conference was at St. Catherine's College. The whole concept of colleges at Oxford is quite different than colleges at US universities. I think that the closest analogy is of a fraternity that also provides tutorials. We stayed in the dorms, and ate in the college dining room. The food was good and exquisitely prepared. Far better than what I remember from my college days.
The only down side was that it was quite warm in England, and many places there do not have air conditioning, including all of Oxford.
After the conference, I went down to visit with Plessey. They were having a sales meeting, and they allowed me to attend their evening meal, where we sat outside (no air conditioning) and discussed business and politics late into the night.
The next day, I met with their management, and left better understanding the reasons behind the upcoming shutdown. While not happy about it, I was pleased to learn that there should be no issue with their restarting their fab on schedule.
It was a good and profitable trip.
For more information on manufacturing, contact our main office 512-342-9871
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We appreciate our customers. Tekmos is meeting innovation every day for tomorrow's challenges.
Sincerely,
Lynn Reed, President
4120 Commercial Center Drive, Suite 400Austin, TX 78744Phone: (512) 342-9871Fax: (512) 342-9873
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