Welcome to another blog in our ongoing series, Ask Lewis Bass!

This series features actual submitted questions from companies in the industries we provide engineering safety consulting services to.

Topics covered include those associated with our work in 3rd party field labeling, SEMI S2/S8/EMC/F47 testing, CE Marking evaluations, and general engineering questions.

Question:

Hi Lewis Bass,

We have a standard BCD unit that received a SEMI certificate in the past. I reached out to the company we made the BCD for and asked for the certificate because we are providing the same BCD to a different customer.

He let me know that he couldn’t give it to us because their customer (who they supplied the BCD to) is in Taiwan and they have an NDA agreement so he thinks he can’t give it to me.

My question is this:

If a tool has been certified to SEMI standards will it always hold that certification if it is made the same way every time? Or will we have to get it certified to the SEMI standards again for each client we ship this tool to if we cannot get a hold of the original certifications?

Asked by Natalie in Newark, CA

Lewis Bass:

Hello Natalie,

Thanks for reaching out to Lewis Bass with this great question about if the SEMI standards support report and certificate applicability across multiple clients for the same system your company has designed.

Our response to your question depends on a few things: who paid for the SEMI evaluation? If your company did, then you should be able to get a copy of the SEMI certificate from the company that did the evaluation. Also, it depends on the customer that is ordering this new tool from your company as to whether they are willing to accept the original report.

The SEMI evaluation sets up an agreement between vendor and customer, and if the new tool is going to them, and they accept the old report, you’re good to go here.

However, sometimes the reports are tied to a unique serial number for that specific tool, and in other similar situations that we have seen in the past our customers often want a fresh SEMI evaluation due to changes in SEMI standards over the years.

In short: we would recommend contacting the firm that performed the original SEMI evaluation to retrieve the original report and certificate first and then reach out to the new client to ask if they will accept this previous SEMI report or if they would require a new SEMI evaluation to be performed. We hope this helps!

 

Do you have a question for Lewis Bass?

If you have a question you would like to ask our engineering team about, and don’t mind it being featured in one of our upcoming blog posts, please contact us and reference “Ask Lewis Bass” in the message body.

Include any helpful context along with the question you’d like us to answer for you. All company contact information except for a first name, is anonymized for privacy reasons.