Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Kirk and Fred discuss when and how best to justify the costs to move from using an external lab to perform HALT testing to building an internal HALT lab.
There are many benefits of having a HALT chamber or environmental testing capability, but many of those reasons are not easily quantifiable in dollars.
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Kirk and Fred discuss what should be considered when choosing to use an external lab to perform HALT evaluations. Distance, costs, measurement instrumentation, lab experience and knowledge of HALT by lab personnel are all part of the considerations deciding what HALT lab to use.
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It is rare to have insight into any internal company history of serious electronic and electromechanical failures. Failure analysis and the causes of electronics or electromechanical systems failure can be a difficult investigation for any manufacturing company. Disclosure of the history and data is rarely if ever published due to the potential liability and litigation costs as well as loss of reputation for reliability and safety.
MTBF for electronics life entitlement measurements is a meaningless term. It says nothing about the distribution of failures or the cause of failures and is only valid for a constant failure rate, which almost never occurs in the real world. It is a term that should be eliminated along with reliability predictions of electronics systems with no moving parts. [Read more…]
“When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.” ― Albert Einstein
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” – Niels Bohr* We have always had a quest to reduce future uncertainties and know what is going to happen to us, how long we will live, and what may impact our lives. Horoscopes, Tarot
Kirk and Fred discuss the marginal value of environmental standards.
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Kirk and Fred discuss where environmental specifications should come from and why they don’t all too often.
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Kirk and Fred discuss a few ideas on minimizing early field failures with your product.
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Implementing a new reliability development paradigm in a company which is using traditional, standards-based testing can be a perilous journey.
It is especially true with introducing HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) in which strength against stress, and not quantifying electronics lifetimes is the new metric. Because of this significant change in test orientation, a critical factor for success begins with educating the company’s top [Read more…]
It is easy to understand why the term HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) is so tightly couple to the equipment called “HALT chambers” systems. Many do not think they can do HALT processes without a “HALT Chamber”. Many know that Dr. Gregg Hobbs, who coined the term HALT and also HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screens), spent much of his life promoting the techniques and was also the founder of two “HALT/HASS” environmental chamber companies. [Read more…]
Many reliability engineers have discovered HALT will quickly find the weaknesses and reliability risks in electronic and electromechanical systems from the capability of thermal cycling and vibration to create rapid mechanical fatigue in electronic assemblies. Assemblies that have latent defects such as cold solder or cracked solder joints, loose connectors or mechanical fasteners, or component package defects can be brought to a detectable, or patent, condition by which we can observe and potentially improve the robustness of an electronics system.
Traditional electronics reliability engineering began during the period of infancy in solid state electronic hardware. The first comprehensive guide to Failure Prediction Methodology (FPM) premiered in 1956 with the publication of the RCA release TR-1100: “Reliability Stress Analysis for Electronic Equipment” presented models for computing rates of component failures. “RADC Reliability Notebook” emerged later in 1959, followed by the publication of a military handbook know as that addressed reliability prediction known as Military Handbook for [Read more…]
In all aspects of engineering we only make improvements and innovation in technology by building on previous knowledge. Yet in the field of reliability engineering (and in particular electronics assemblies and systems), sharing the knowledge about field failures of electronics hardware and the true root causes is extremely limited. Without the ability to share data and teach what we know about the real causes of “un-reliability” in the field, it is more easily understood why the belief in the ability able to model and predict the future of electronics life and MTBF continue to dominate the field of electronics reliability
Kirk and Fred discuss steps that should be followed when trying to find the location and cause of failures in electronics.
They use examples of from their own experiences with recent failures of appliances and personal computers and how using a systematic approach to investigating failures is the best way to discover the causes of failures.
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Kirk and Fred discuss how to know when a failure occurs during a stress test to find operational and destruct limits.
In some cases, the failure and component causing the failure are very obvious when “the smoke comes out”.
In other cases, the product being tested has a performance degradation under increased stress that can be used as discriminators for ensuring reliability and quality during product development and manufacturing.
They also discuss how some fundamental technology limitations of common operational monitors, such as a display LCD, does not have to limit the stress to the more typically more capable circuit board assembly.
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