Integrating device modeling in QFD implementation for power electronics application

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD), through the implementation of the house of quality (HOQ) matrix offers a way to organize and communicate market information to engineering. This HOQ matrix uses a symbolic representation to model the inter-related functions within a company that contribute to product design, development and manufacture. Representation in a matrix manner makes clear the connections between engineering design decisions and their impact on the customers. The entries to the matrix rely on subjective judgement as they derived from the brainstorming among engineers and sales and marketing personnel. This could make the entries process tedious and subjective, which may render the output from the QFD inappropriate, depending on the expertise of the people involved in the brainstorming. This is true especially for the technical correlation matrix. The situation is worse as the devices are becoming move complex. In this work, device modeling is employed to generate the entries for the technical correlation matrix. Factor analysis is used to study the correlation among the various parameters in a device as their values are generated from the device model. The estimation of the communalities between all the parameters are computed using the principal components method. This concept is illustrated with a power diode in this work. The power diode is chosen because the pn junction is the basis of all microelectronic devices, and unlike small signal diodes, power diode modeling is more complicated due to the need to consider both the high and low level injections in the modeling.