Tekmos' Blog

Adrian DeLeon is the Post Manufacturing Test Floor Manager for Tekmos, a highly focused, and challenging leadership position in an often-fast paced environment. He is accountable for managing communications with test floor crew, production, customer service, and operations of schedules and systems that guarantee inventory control, finished goods, shipping of products, and an overall effective and efficient production flow.

2020 is his 6th year at Tekmos. Adrian was sought out by the Vice President of Operations after meeting at one of the elite trainings the Boy Scouts of America has to offer, the Wood Badge. Adrian is an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in Boy Scouts of America, a distinction that several Tekmos Team members hold including President Lynn Reed. Adrian has also earned every merit badge, an accomplishment in itself. Only 4% of Boy Scouts have achieved this rank since its inception in 1911.

Some of the priorities of the test floor include: Managing and ensuring safe, quality test floor operations for the testing and programming of various semiconductors, microcontrollers and microchips. Other priorities include the enforcement and maintenance of quality control and environmental industry-respected best practices to meet customer, and applicable regulatory requirements.

Tekmos uses several types of machines needed in Fabless facilities, such as hot and cold temperature forcing probes, bake ovens, gravity-fed MCTs, an automatic multitester, a pick-and-place Aetrium, V-Tek Tape & Reel machines, and the newest machine, the Exatron pick-and-place handler.

Tekmos uses ATEs to reduce manufacturing costs, improve yield, and specifically to prevent defective devices ending up with consumers. Tape and reel equipment as the name implies, is the equipment used in packing and sealing finished products into individual pockets of a carrier tape, and in rolling this tape onto a reel. Tekmos uses tape and reel when a customer requires it as well as for large quantity part orders. Taping and reeling is an alternative packaging process for small surface mount devices that are impractical to ship in tubes. Tekmos ships parts in tubes, tape and reel and other packaging when required.

Inventory management is a large part of what keeps the manufacturing side running smoothly at Tekmos. Due to the high volume at which parts are manufactured and sold, we require inventory to match up precisely with our accounting software. This is so sales may be able to quote correct quantities available for purchase, as well as start new inventory lots when needed.

At the start of each month, our inventory room and test floor is cross reviewed against our digital backlog and adjusted according to the physical inventory we have on hand. It is my job as the inventory control manager to track down any inconsistencies we have, and correct them. This can consist of entering any missing travelers into our database, converting untested stock to finished goods stock, and removing any parts deemed as rejects due to production failures or other testing.

Often times, our engineers will need various amounts of parts in order to do further testing into the quality and reliability of our microchips, along with other studies. In these instances, we use a logged tracking system to check in/out parts, record where these parts are going, who has them, and whether or not they will be returning to finished goods to be sold.

As our stock levels currently hold over 600 different types of microprocessors for various applications, monthly inventory can seem overwhelming at times. Luckily we have implemented small but impactful changes in the systems we use to make this task a bit easier on everyone. We keep track of our chips using the systems previously described, as well as others such as physically marking inventory boxes to clearly show which parts have had significant movement over the past month, and those that have not.

Another way we maintain and keep a strong hold of inventory is in visibility, segregation, and separation. This focuses on where the parts are in their journey from production to customer and how they are marked along the way.

Over the summer we rolled out an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The aim of this system is to automate many of the day to day tasks we deal with at a company level and reduce the chance of miscommunication between employees.

The system we use is broken down into “Projects” and “Issues”. A Project is what the bigger picture would be, for example, travelers, new engineering test releases, sales orders, etc. An Issue is a single instance of the project, such as a single traveler for a specific part, a new test for a part, or a sales order. Although our ERP system is still a work in progress, we have currently moved our traveler system for testing parts to a digital system and as a result have improved productivity by streamlining the process.

To accomplish the traveler system, multiple databases have been created that contain our commonly used setups for hardware, software, and testing. This information is then automatically populated into the travelers. This allows the test engineers to speed up the initial stages by having all the information they need available to them instead of having to ask the engineers for the appropriate setup information. We have also integrated several tablets into the system to allow for the digital traveler to travel (move) with the parts from station to station, in a way similar to how the paper travelers moved with the parts.

The databases from the travelers play into the engineering test releases as well. Prior to this system there was never a clear database that was updated with all the approved hardware configurations. When the engineers completed tests, these tests were released to their standards without a universal internal standard. To help with the population of the database another project was created to keep track of these tests.

The sales order Project prompts whomever is processing the customer order for the basic information about the order and then sends this information to the next person to work on the order. After the information is entered into the system, an automatic email is generated and sent to the customer informing them that their inquiry has been received and an update with specifics about their order being processed will be sent soon. With this system all of our sales orders are presented in one place with the date they were received and entered, as well as reminders being sent to key people to follow up on the progress of these orders if they aren’t handled in a timely manner.

The National Institute for Standards and Technology recently released a set of standards for cyber security. Defense contractors are required to implement these standards by the end of 2017, and that applies to Tekmos. We started off already being compliant with about half of the standards. Achieving compliance with the other half of the standards is more of a challenge.

One major area we are working on is formal documentation. The NIST standards require formal procedures for all aspects of cybersecurity. We already have informal procedures, but converting all of them to formal procedures is a major undertaking. The one advantage to creating all of this documentation is that it fits in with our AS9100 documentation we are creating for our certification audit later on this year.

The second area of work is the addition of card readers to each PC to only allow authorized users on each work station. At first, this seems straightforward, but becomes more complicated when our testers are taken into account. The testers are tightly coupled to engineering, and so are part of our network. But they also run independently, and we have one operator taking care of multiple tester / handler configurations. It is not clear how we will address this.

Another interesting area is the requirement of a whitelist for approved programs. Engineering will frequently try out new programs as part of their jobs. And so the procedures need to be written to allow this, while still providing security.

There is still a lot to do, but we are optimistic that we will be compliant by the deadline. And give the increased cyber threats these days, it is good to be improving our defenses.

Last month, Tekmos sent a representative to the annual meeting of the Space Parts Working Group. This is a meeting of government users of satellites, companies that make satellites, and component manufacturers that make parts for satellites. The meeting was for two days, and consisted of presentations from government users and the component manufacturers. It also presented a lot of networking opportunities.

Tekmos sells several products into the aerospace market. We are also working on upgrading our quality system from ISO9001 up to AS9100, which is now being required by some of our customers. After that, the next step is changing our products to offer an even higher level of reliability. And the first stage of that process is to determine what are the limits with current parts. And that is why we were at the Space Parts Working Group.

So, what did we learn? Being space related, radiation damage was a big topic. The higher the orbit, the greater the damage. As a subset of radiation, heavy ions are an increasing concern. Heavy ions are also a problem with the aviation market, and have been identified as a cause of commercial aviation engine failure in at least one instance. Another issue was bond wire integrity, as a result of corrosion, thermal cycle, and vibration during launch. And as with all semiconductor users, there were concerns about obsolescence and counterfeiting. These are all areas that will be addressed as we develop the next generation of Tekmos products.