Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Kirk and Fred discuss working with suppliers to obtain the desired reliability performance. It starts with how you specify reliability. It must include sufficient detail so your supplier understands your request.
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Kirk and Fred discuss how competing business priorities create obstacles to achieving desired reliability objectives. The culture of your organization may limit your ability as a reliability professional to do your job effectively.
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One aspect of HALT, (a test to find weaknesses and reliability risks empirically), is the difficulty for many engineers that are new to the HALT- that it guarantees that the maximum or recommended operating environmental specifications for the system and components under test will be exceeded, and failures beyond spec are potentially relevant to field reliability. [Read more…]
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…]
