1. Purpose of the gate
The supplier's own qualification shows that the part meets the standard its market expects. It does not show that the part works in a particular customer's product, built on that customer's assembly line, running that customer's software and used in that customer's environment. Many customers, especially in automotive, industrial, infrastructure and data centre markets, run their own qualification before they place production orders: board level reliability, system tests, stress in the application and a review of the supplier's documents and quality system. Until they approve, a design win is a promise rather than revenue.
The product lifecycle sets four criteria: customer qualification samples supplied from the production flow; customer test results received, with any failure dispositioned; customer approvals recorded for each lead customer, or a date agreed; and a production part approval submitted where the market requires one. The first criterion matters because a customer that qualifies engineering parts will usually have to repeat the work on production parts. The third criterion accepts an agreed date because approvals arrive at the customer's pace, not the supplier's, and the gate records each lead customer's position rather than waiting for the last one.
A production part approval is the formal submission that automotive practice under IATF 16949 asks of its suppliers, and that some industrial and medical customers ask for in a similar form. It shows that the supplier's production process makes parts that meet the customer's requirements consistently: design and specification records, the process flow, the process failure modes and effects analysis, the control plan, measurement system studies, initial process capability, the qualification results, material declarations and a signed part submission statement. The customer approves the submission before it accepts production shipments, and any later change to the approved process must be notified and often approved again.
The gate sits inside the Sampling status, which runs from validation through sampling and qualification until production release closes it. Production release opens order entry for the whole market; this gate tells the business which lead customers can order production quantities on the first day and which must wait. It is owned by quality and reliability, because the approvals are quality documents, but it is decided with sales, because each approval is also the point at which a design win starts to become demand.
| Engineering gate | Lifecycle | Relation | What it brings to this gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer workloads qualified | AI accelerator | Feeds | The benchmark report showing lead customers' workloads run correctly, at the agreed accuracy and performance, on the production system and release candidate software. |
| Customer qualification approved | Memory | Matches | Customer qualification approvals from the lead system makers that validated the part on their platforms. |
| Customer product qualified | Package technology | Matches | The customer approval record for a lead customer product built on the new package technology. |
The SoC, analog and mixed-signal, chiplet and FPGA lifecycles have no separate customer qualification gate. Their qualification passed and production release gates carry the qualification report, characterisation and test data that customers review during their own qualification.
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