The use of experiments to understand and improve processes and designs is as old as engineering. In the personal experience of the speaker, experiments are widely used in verification and validation steps on the right hand side of the V-model, but not nearly as much on the left hand side. The tendency seems to be that a lot of effort is put in understanding systems from the inside out (Small example of ASML’s modelling effort on wafer deformation) whereas quite often, a black-box approach can also yield very useful results; especially when modelling efforts seem too difficult or simply impracticable. This presentation is meant to start a discussion on the use of experiments in the design process.
Michel Dijkstra, TMC