Reliability behaviour of electronic components as a function of time

Abstract

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the behaviour of the hazard rate function h(t) as a function of time. This discussion has led to a lot of speculation as to the shape of the traditional 'bathtub' curve showing failure or hazard rate as a function of time. Studies at the International Electronics Reliability Institute (IERI) at Loughborough University of Technology, in the United Kingdom, have recently been examining in detail the database created from field failure returns on a wide spectrum of electronic components. These components are in equipment subject to a spread of environmental conditions. The database created has been exercised with particular reference to the behaviour of MOS ICS, rectangular connectors, bipolar transistors and pn-junction diodes. Data has been analysed using pooled information from a wide variety of sources and also from two specific environmental conditions, ground benign and ground mobile.The results of this analysis are presented and the failure intensities as a function of time are given at 1000 hour intervals up to a total time of 21,000 hours. Confidence limits at the 95 per cent X2 level are also given. The results show a rapidly falling failure intensity for the first few thousand hours and after this time the failure intensity appears to be relatively constant given the accuracy obtainable with the data available. KEY WORDS Electronic components Reliability Time dependent behaviour BACKGROUNDThe collection of electronic component reliability data from the field has been under way at IERI for a period of four years or so. Data has been collected

Clustering Empirical Failure Rate Curves for Reliability Prediction Purposes in the Case of Consumer Electronic Products

“…These aftermarket services are developed to repair different types of electronic products, modules, and parts. In today's highly competitive electronic products market, product reliability analysis and prediction has become extremely important for OEMs . ERSP companies play an important role in providing OEMs with relevant information regarding the reliability of their products and possess field failure data of on‐the‐market consumer electronic products, which can serve as a basis for predicting the reliability of future products.…”

“…In today's highly competitive electronic products market, product reliability analysis and prediction has become extremely important for OEMs. 3 ERSP companies play an important role in providing OEMs with relevant information regarding the reliability of their products and possess field failure data of on-the-market consumer electronic products, which can serve as a basis for predicting the reliability of future products. In reliability theory, the 'bathtub shape' is widely used to describe the failure patterns of different products.…”

“…Because of shortening life cycles and times between the design and release‐to‐market phases, consumer electronics are typically functionally tested rather than passed through deeper reliability tests. It results in the fact that the failure rate or hazard rate function, which is a commonly used quantity to describe electronic product life characteristics, is bathtub‐shaped with all three sections of the traditional bathtub curve. In this paper, a new way of modeling and forecasting bathtub‐shaped failure rate lifetime data of newly marketed consumer electronics is addressed and discussed.…”

Forecasting Failure Rates of Electronic Goods by Using Decomposition and Fuzzy Clustering of Empirical Failure Rate Curves

“…In addition to that, considering the shortening product life-cycles, the curves of failure rate functions of consumer electronics are bathtubshaped with all the three characteristic phases of the traditional bathtub curve: the decreasing first phase, called infancy period, the quasi constant second phase, which is also referenced as the period of normal operation or useful life, and the third, increasing one representing the wear-out period. The failure rate functions, that are also called hazard functions, represent the characteristics of product life (Goel and Graves, 2006;Economou, 2004;Campbell et al, 1992). Similarly to product-or business related life-cycles (Gelei and Dobos, 2014), the failure rate functions can be considered as characteristics that reflect the product reliability over the product life-cycle.…”