Credentials

Company reliability expert

My opinion is that Climate Change issues and appeals to society for consideration and possible paths to start to take regarding them for solutions are indeed urgent. I worked in the semiconductor industry for 22 years as a reliability engineer. There were two main responsibilities I had. 1.) I assessed the reliability of the technology used to manufacture the chips (in other words, determine equations to calculate how long the chip components in cell phones and computers would last in users’ hands) either during technology development in order to give feedback to the development engineers about whether the technology should be adjusted, or alternatively for an existing technology to work with chip designs to guide them about whether their chips would be reliable enough. 2.) When design mistakes were made, I used the already existing technology reliability assessments I had to predict (calculate) what the failure rate might be (how many chips would fail over time), and then worked with various departments in the company (sometimes all of them) to determine how to best contain the risk exposure and any associated financial litigation. In other words, I was one of the key “fixers” of the company, 

Given this job skill, and my scientific and technology education and knowledge, I feel I am in a reasonably good position to judge the urgency associated with the need to solve Climate Change. In addition, my job skill associated with cleaning up the impacts associated with chip design mistakes, gives me clear insight into when and how quickly to start the “clean-up” process. In these types of circumstances, it is an “All Hands On Deck” event. Everyone needs to be assembled as a full team and get ready to all work together. The cleanup process starts Immediately and with Full Force activities to establish both a set of predictions (calculations) for expected severity and the associated plans with the necessary effort to fix the entire problem (reach the intended target), based on the best knowledge to date. Once all those pieces are in place, and the implementation has been started, there needs to be close monitoring of the necessary data associated with the measured impact in real time. If the earlier-predicted outcome (to reach the eventually needed target) is different from the latest data, then changes to the plan need to be made as soon as possible to try and meet the intended target. This process needs to occur as often as is reasonable. Note that the more advanced plan to reach the initially-intended goal may not look anything like the initial plan, but the knowledge that comes from needing to adjust the plan in real time can be instrumental in knowing what not to do in the future. That is why it is imperative to tackle these problems immediately with full force: to learn as much as possible about what works, and what is actually achievable.