IPC Conference on Test & Inspection - May 15-17, 2012, Costa Mesa, CA Ops A La Carte will be giving a presentation at this conference on "New Techniques for More Effective ESS". Contact Us …
Reliability Testing
In the Twilight Zone of Humidity Testing
After 25 years in the reliability field I am still a bit mystified by the humidity testing. Generally the environmental tests can be divided into two major categories: Durability tests, where some form of wear-out mechanism causes products to fail. The most common examples of durability tests are vibration and thermal cycling. The second group is the capability tests, often referred as overstress tests with the goal of determining how well the product can resist certain conditions such as high voltage, accidental drop, dust, or others. It appears that humidity tests belong somewhere in between the two categories. On one hand there are electro-migration, corrosion, dendritic growth, and other failure mechanisms following the pattern of wear-out processes. Those failure mechanisms are …
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Setting Reliability Goals using Benchmarking
One of our readers, John Hurtley from Tolomatic, wrote the following: We have been doing design reliability testing for sometime now. We're using a software tool from ReliaSoft that works well in designing the test and analyzing the results. A major problem within our wall is selecting a reliability level to be achieved and the applied confidence bounds that should be used for our product / industry. Does anyone know of a resource that could help in providing a bench mark for reliability? Ideally a list of industries and the reliability levels typically applied. Or, a define method / tool that would assist us to determine our reliability requirements from within. Mike Silverman's response: Reliability goal setting is not something you will find in any specific tool. This is something …
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