An adaption of the Functional Safety standards IEC 61508 and IEC 26262 by the European Union brought a new life into slowly fading activity of reliability prediction. Both reliability prediction and reliability demonstration are now key parts of many product development programs, however despite phonetic similarity those two have little in common as well as the result they generate. While reliability prediction is an analytical activity often based on mathematical combination of reliabilities of parts or components comprising the system; reliability demonstration is based on product testing and is statistically driven by the test sample size. Therefore the obtained results could drastically differ. For example, a predicted system failure rate of 30 FIT (30 failures per billion (109) …
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