S. J. Horley, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR; J. Rascon, Intel Corporation, Chandler, AZ

Summary: The longer defective units are in the manufacturing pipeline before they are detected, the more expensive it becomes. Therefore, economic pressures drive the requirement to capture failures and perform root cause analysis further upstream in the product manufacturing cycle. This places greater emphasis in the ability to identify failures and perform value add analysis to drive product improvements as early as possible. The topic of discussion will be the method used to develop a reliable Unified Data Stream (UDS) that feeds the failure analysis process which in turn provides actionable information to product development teams in the Personal Computer (PC) environment.