In the printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing industry, the yield is an important management factor as it significantly affects the product cost and quality. However, in real situations, it is difficult to ensure a high yield in a manufacturing process, because the products are manufactured through numerous nanoscale manufacturing operations. Thus, for improving the yield, it is necessary to analyze the key process parameters and equipment parameters that result in a low yield. In this study, critical equipment parameters that affect the yield were extracted through a mutual analysis of the equipment parameters (x) and process parameters (y) in the plastic ball grid array (PBGA) manufacturing process. To this end, the study uses the correlation coefficient to apply the heuristic algorithm that extracts critical parameters that keep the redundancy among the equipment parameters to a minimum and exert maximum impact on the critical process parameters. Additionally, by using the general regression neural network technique, the effects of the critical equipment parameters on the process parameters were confirmed. The test results were applied to the PBGA production line and an improvement in the yield was confirmed.

Inverter-Type refrigerators are known to consume less energy by varying the inverter frequency according to indoor temperatures and refrigerant pressure through indoor-outdoor communication. However, many commercial operators cannot afford to replace indoor units with ones capable of communication. In a non-communication configuration, indoor units are connected with an inverter-type outdoor unit without intercommunication abilities. The research goal is finding appropriate operating parameters to achieve energy efficiency. Thus, an operation algorithm with two modes is proposed, i.e., one to search the best operating parameters and one for normal operation with the best parameters. The experimental evaluation showed 11.27% reduction in energy consumption, indicating a good applicability of the algorithm.