Quality Assurance in Industry

Industry-Specific Standards in Quality Assurance

• Industry-specific standards are developed to address unique requirements and challenges within a particular sector, ensuring products and services meet industry-specific expectations.
• Examples of industry-specific standards include:
  • IATF 16949:2016 for the automotive industry, focusing on continuous improvement, defect prevention, and reduction of variation and waste in the supply chain.
  • ISO 13485 for the medical device industry, emphasizing risk management and regulatory compliance.
  • AS9100 for the aerospace industry, building upon the ISO 9001 framework and addressing factors such as configuration management, traceability, and advanced product quality planning.

Companies Associated with Industry-Specific Standards

• Automotive industry: General Motors (GM), Ford Motor Company, Toyota Motor Corporation, Volkswagen Group, Bosch Group
• Medical device industry: Medtronic, Inc, Siemens Healthineers, Johnson & Johnson, Philips Healthcare, Boston Scientific Corporation, GE Healthcare
• Aerospace industry: Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Safran, GE Aviation

Tools for Quality Assurance

• Automated testing tools:
  • Selenium for web applications
  • Appium for mobile applications
• Code review tools:
  • GitHub for pull request workflow
  • GitLab for merge request workflow
  • Review Board for reviewing code changes
• Static code analysis tools:
  • ESLint for JavaScript code
  • Pylint for Python code
  • Flake8 for Python code
• Performance and scalability assessment tools:
  • (Tools not specified, but mentioned as assessing performance and scalability)

Customer Focus

• Recognize direct and indirect customers as those who receive value from the organization
• Understand customers' current and future needs and expectations
• Link the organization's objectives to customer needs and expectations
• Communicate customer needs and expectations throughout the organization
• Plan, design, develop, produce, deliver, and support goods and services to meet customer needs and expectations
• Measure and monitor customer satisfaction and take appropriate actions

Leadership and Employee Engagement

• Leaders at all levels establish unity of purpose and direction, creating conditions for people to engage in achieving the organization's quality objectives
• Creation of unity of purpose and direction enables the organization to align its strategies, policies, processes, and resources to achieve its objectives
• Benefits of leadership and employee engagement include:
  • Increased effectiveness and efficiency in meeting quality objectives
  • Better coordination of processes
  • Improved communication between levels and functions
  • Development and improvement of the organization's capability to deliver desired results

Process Management and Improvement

• Define objectives of the system and processes necessary to achieve them
• Establish authority, responsibility, and accountability for managing processes
• Understand the organization's capabilities and determine resource constraints
• Determine process interdependencies and analyze the effect of modifications to individual processes on the system as a whole
• Manage processes and their interrelations as a system to achieve quality objectives effectively and efficiently
• Ensure necessary information is available to operate and improve processes
• Manage risks that can affect outputs of the processes and overall outcomes of the quality management system

Integrated Circuits (ICs)

• Also known as microchips or chips
• Consist of semiconductor devices (transistors, diodes, and resistors) and passive components (capacitors and inductors) fabricated onto a single piece of semiconductor material, typically silicon
• Semiconductor materials selection depends on factors such as intended application, performance requirements, cost considerations, and manufacturing constraints
• Examples of semiconductor materials include:
  • Gallium Arsenide (GaAs)
  • Silicon (Si)
  • Gallium Nitride (GaN)
  • Indium Phosphide (InP)

IC Fabrication Process

• Wafer preparation: cleaning and polishing to remove impurities and defects
• Photolithography: transferring mask patterns onto the wafer
• Etching: removing material from the wafer according to the pattern defined by the photoresist
• Doping and diffusion: introducing impurities to modify the semiconductor material's properties
• Thin film deposition: depositing layers of material onto the wafer
• Annealing: heating the wafer to remove impurities and defects
• Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP): smoothing the wafer's surface
• Lithography and patterning: creating patterns on the wafer
• Testing and packaging: verifying the IC's functionality and packaging it for use