Component Tolerance Design
Your company has started to manufacture an electronic product but you are concerned about product yield. The problem has arisen because of ‘tolerance stacking’. You now realise that you should have carried out a tolerance analysis and included tolerance design in the overall design process.

For simple circuits such as potential dividers a yield analysis can be carried out using simple two dimensional graphical analyses. For more complex circuits it may be necessary to use software tools to implement analysis including:

o Vertex Analysis
o Regionalisation
o Monte Carlo Analysis

You decide to find out more about these techniques to improve your yield

Guidance notes

Remember you do not necessarily have to solve the problem described. You do, however, need to understand and be able to explain how you would approach the problem.

Learning Outcomes

Following this PBL cycle you should be able to:

o Explain the concept of product yield
o Discuss how product yield may be affected by component tolerance specification.
o Discuss the use of tolerance analysis in the context of electronic design for manufacture.
o Carry out a simple (graphical) yield analysis on a potential divider circuit given resistor values and tolerances together with input and output voltage range specifications.

Resources

Internet

http://www.edn.com/article/CA408380.html