Six-Sigma Based Performance Verification in Early Development of Automatic Test Equipment

This paper proposes a six-sigma based performance verification approach to characterizing the channel voltage variation of automatic testing equipment (ATE). The purpose of the performance verification is to determine the level of measurement uncertainty in ATE voltage channels. Six-Sigma tools may not be directly applied to the measurement data when the underlying distribution is highly skewed. A solution is to appropriately transform the original data set into a new domain such that the transformed data can be approximated by the normal distribution. Then the six-sigma tools can be adopted to quantify the lower and upper limits of the random voltage signals. The proposed method was successfully applied to characterize the noise window, or the voltage variation limits, on the broadband AC (BBAC) instrument.