The Taguchi Contribution to DoE

One of the pioneers in using DoE for new product PCB design and manufacturing is Dr. Genishi Taguchi. Sometimes his name was synonymous with DoE, as in the “Taguchi methods.” He is credited with transforming DoE from the realm of statisticians to be generally used by engineers and even production operators. His important contributions reduce the experiment design complexity and introduce new terminology to illustrate and simplify DoE concepts. These include the following:

•       Ignore three-way interactions and above as in Resolution IV designs

•       Use linear graphs to visualize interactions instead of interaction tables

•       Use the signal to noise (S/N), to be discussed later, as a method to combine average and variability analysis

•       Use p% contribution as a method to quantify the F test in the ANOVA table

•       Use quality loss function (QLF) as a methodology to optimize quality as discussed in Chapter 6 of this book