Patent ID: 7069196

Claim:
A method of designing experiments for acquiring processing experience in the design and manufacture of a product comprising: (a) determining critical variables for the product; (b) generating causal map-based coefficients for a matrix A as a function of the critical variables; (c) setting a design matrix U k =0 and k=0; (d) generating a base design matrix X; (e) evaluating Y(P)=(I−B(B T B) −1 B T )[XP)//U]A according to Wynn's criterion, where P is a permutation matrix, I is an identity matrix, B is a blocking matrix, B T is a transposed matrix of B, A is a matrix composed of causal map-based coefficients, and Y(P) is a possible solution for the design matrix U k ; (f) setting k←k+1; (g) running an algorithm to choose the best of random column permutations matrices P; (h) running an algorithm to choose the best column permutation matrix P that is near a previous solution for the design matrix U k ; and (i) setting design matrix U k to solution comprising XP k with rows from U k−1 appended; and (m) manufacturing prototype wafers using the experimental design matrix U k .