ASM’s Implementation of New Product Safety Engineering Program

Tara Smithers
(ASM, AZ)

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The equipment designers within the semiconductor industry have learned a lot over the last 25+ years about hazards and how to control the potential risks. They have documented these learnings in the various safety guidelines, standards, regulation and directives that are currently published. In total, these safety regulations have been a very positive resource to help prevent known hazard situations. The painful reality is that there are thousands of pages of safety design requirements to be considered, and this number grows greater each year. They don’t teach this information at colleges or universities. So, how does the industry transfer the knowledge of these standards to the equipment designers? The Product Safety Engineer cannot facilitate as a “safety cop” and check each and every design after it is designed; our industry is too fast paced for that. The only successful way to design safe and compliant tools is to share the responsibility and knowledge among the cross-functional teams that design the equipment. ASM has taken a two-tier approach to close this knowledge gap. • Continued Design Engineering Training • Published internal ASM Product Safety Design Guidelines. The first part to successfully transfer the knowledge of safe and compliant design requirements is Continued Engineering Training. At ASM, we have started a 4 Phase Training Program. The second part of the program is the Product Safety Design Guidelines. These are documents that contain compliance information and BKMs by subject matter (i.e. information to reference after the training). They reference various safety and compliance standards/directives that were used to create the document – reducing thousands of pages into a few. ASM uses an online WIKI program to provide engineers with important information that is easy to navigate and search through. These Product Safety Design Guidelines can be accessed through links in this WIKI as well as a link to the full printable PDF. There are also pictures and examples of BKMs and non-BKMs/non-compliances in each document. With the face to face continued training and the Design Guidelines, ASM hopes to increase the knowledge of the design engineers and share the responsibility and knowledge of producing safe and compliance equipment.

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