High-Bandwidth-Memory Yield Ramp Leader

The mandate

The executive directing HBM industrialisation began extended medical leave immediately after a bonding-yield excursion interrupted customer qualification lots. Functional leaders can run their modules, but no one presently owns the cross-step trade-offs between wafer quality, TSV integrity, stacking, thermal behaviour, final test and committed sample dates.

The appointee must mobilise within three weeks and hold the manufacturing decision seat for eighteen months. Permanent succession planning begins after month twelve, once the root-cause system and ramp governance are demonstrably stable; up to eight weeks of paired customer and factory reviews are reserved for transfer.

The assignment ends when both nominated products sustain twelve consecutive production lots above their board-approved yield corridors, two strategic customer qualifications are released without open severity-one exceptions, the excursion playbook has passed an unannounced drill, and the successor has chaired a complete monthly ramp cycle. Volume alone cannot substitute for these conditions.

The interim may quarantine material, stop tools or process steps, reprioritise engineering lots, commission failure analysis and redeploy temporary specialists within the authorised ramp budget. Changes to product architecture, capital above KRW 5 billion, permanent appointments and commercial concessions remain with the Executive Manufacturing Council; shipment pressure cannot overrule a documented quality hold.

Commodity-memory optimisation, greenfield fab construction and customer pricing are excluded. The brief covers the two HBM products, their wafer-to-package yield chain, qualification evidence and the operating discipline needed for a safe production climb.

Why this seat is open

An unplanned medical absence removed the only executive integrating several technically strong but locally measured teams. The timing coincides with a yield excursion and inflexible customer qualification windows. Leadership wants a proven ramp operator to restore fact-based decisions while protecting the incumbent's privacy and avoiding a rushed permanent choice.

What you will own

• Establish one defect pareto from wafer probe through final test and rule which losses require containment, experimentation or tolerated monitoring.
• Decide lot disposition and tool-release gates using traceable evidence from process control, metrology, reliability and customer specifications.
• Rebuild the design-of-experiments queue around learning value, bottleneck capacity and qualification deadlines rather than functional seniority.
• Create a daily yield room that converts excursions into named hypotheses, discriminating tests, containment owners and expiring assumptions.
• Negotiate customer qualification evidence packs with quality and account teams while preserving internal root-cause candour and change control.
• Allocate scarce bonding, inspection and failure-analysis capacity across engineering and production lots against an agreed economic priority model.
• Transfer a stable yield cockpit, experiment ledger, open-risk map and qualified deputies to the incoming manufacturing leader.

Candidate qualifications

• Led volume yield ramp for advanced memory, 2.5D or 3D semiconductor products involving wafer, interconnect, assembly and final-test dependencies.
• Personally held or released production material after a material excursion and can show how customer commitments were protected without weakening controls.
• Improved stacked-die or advanced-package yield through statistically disciplined experiments whose learning survived scale-up across multiple tools or lines.
• Managed senior process, equipment, quality and test leaders in a high-volume Asian fabrication environment with direct output accountability.
• Presented qualification evidence and recovery forecasts to technically demanding hyperscale, accelerator or computing-hardware customers.
• Built a successor-ready manufacturing system with durable daily control, escalation and knowledge-transfer routines rather than hero-led firefighting.

Non-negotiables

• Can work on site in South Korea and travel weekly between the Seoul office and manufacturing corridor for the full assignment.
• Available within three weeks and able to hold an exclusive executive operating commitment during the initial nine months.
• Will enforce documented lot holds independently of revenue pressure and disclose any recent customer or equipment-vendor conflicts.
• Brings direct HBM or closely analogous stacked-die yield leadership, not solely device design or commercial programme experience.

1. 49 words maximum. What is your earliest start date, and can you commit to weekly factory travel from Seoul for eighteen months?
2. 49 words maximum. Describe the hardest stacked-die yield excursion you owned, the discriminating test you chose and the sustained-lot result.
3. 49 words maximum. Which production decision did you hold despite customer pressure, and what evidence ultimately supported release?