Process Yield Analysis for Nonlinear Profiles in the Presence of Gauge Measurement Errors

Process yield plays an important role in many manufacturing industries for measuring process performance. However, gauge measurement errors have significant effect on process capability analysis. In this study, we present a method based on the yield index to evaluate the process yield of nonlinear profiles in the presence of gauge measurement errors. The results indicate that the presence of gauge measurement errors in the data leads to different behaviors of the yield index estimator according to the existence of the gauge variability. Our proposed test procedure can be easily used to determine whether or not manufacturing processes meet the quality requirements when gauge measurement errors are considered. A real example from a manufacturing process is used to demonstrate the applications of the proposed method.