1. Purpose of the gate
Qualification passed is the engineering verdict on whether the product will keep working over its life in its customers' conditions, and whether every part shipped will be tested to the same limits. It is separate from Production release on purpose. Production release is the company's decision to sell in volume, resting on supply agreements and the quality system; it should be taken on a qualification result that has already been judged on its own evidence, by the people who ran it, without the pull of a first purchase order.
For a fabless startup the stress tests run at outsourced reliability laboratories on parts from outsourced foundry, assembly and test suppliers, so the review also checks that the parts qualified really came from the production flow the company will ship from. Parts built on a development route, a different assembly line or a test program that has since changed do not qualify the product.
The gate criteria are a qualification report showing the stress tests in the qualification plan passed to the chosen standard such as JEDEC or AEC-Q100, every failure analysed with its cause and disposition recorded, characterisation complete across the conditions in the plan with the limits for the datasheet set, and the production test program released and correlated across the testers and sites used. It is the third technical readiness review in the startup lifecycle, after Test chip validated and Product tape-out.
10 more sections for registered members.