May
13
Applied Reliability Symposium
May 13, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By
Applied Reliability Symposium – June 13-15, 2012, New Orleans, LA
Ops A La Carte’s Mike Silverman will be giving a presentation on "DFROI – Calculating ROI When Implementing a Design for Reliability Program".
For more info, please Contact Us
May
8
Reducing Cost Through via Common Sense
May 8, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Gozzo
Competitive advantage is driven by cost reduction. However, cost reduction is a by-product of the efforts to improve quality and reduce time of availability.
Reducing manufacturing changeover time (setup reduction -SMED) accomplishes this. It provides the benefits of quality and time reduction while developing flexibility to respond to customer changes,
How well are you doing this? What kind of insight and advantage are you giving your customers? Understand what are the tasks to do this.
Contact the author for more direction in this area!
Mike Gozzo
May
2
Functional Safety: Reliability Prediction vs. Reliability Demonstration
May 2, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Andre Kleyner
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) hours) would corresponds to a 10 year reliability of 99.87% (assuming 12 hours per day operation). In order to demonstrate this kind of reliability with 50% confidence (50% confidence is considered low in most industries) one would need to successfully test 533 parts (based on binomial distribution) to the equivalent of 10 year field life. Needless to say that this kind of test sample is prohibitive in most industries. For example in the automotive electronics the test sample size of 23 is quite common, which roughly corresponds to 97% reliability with 50% confidence.
The natural question is: how do you reconcile the numbers obtained from reliability prediction with the numbers you can support as part of reliability demonstration?
The answer is: I don’t believe that you can.
You can make an argument that reliability demonstration produces the lower estimate values. Additionally the test is often addresses higher percentile severity users, thus the demonstrated reliability for the whole product population will likely be higher. However, in most of the cases the gap will remain too wide to close. This is something, which reliability engineers, design teams, and most importantly customers need to be aware of and be able to deal with as part of the product development reality.
What does the audience think? We’d love to hear your opinions on this.
Andre Kleyner
May
1
SMTA Conference on Soldering and Reliability
May 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By
SMTA Conference on Soldering and Reliability – May 15-18, 2012, Toronto
Ops A La Carte’s Peter Arrowsmith will be giving a presentation at this conference on "Improving Product Reliability Using Accelerated Stress Testing".
For more info, please
Apr
22
MD&M East
April 22, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Silverman
MD&M East – May 22-24, 2012, Philadelphia, PA
Ops A La Carte’s Mike Silverman will be giving a three hour class on "Medical Reliability Testing – Identifying Testing Requirements Early."
For more info, please Contact Us
Apr
15
Robust Design and Reliability Activities
April 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Lou LaVallee
Robust Design & Reliability
I delivered a webinar recently to describe the differences and similarities between robust design (RD) activities and reliability engineering (RE) activities in hardware product development . A survey we took from several hundred attendees indicated a diversity of opinions. About half the participants indicated they did not differentiate at all between the two methodologies. Approximately 20 % indicated they did differentiate between the two methodologies, and about 30% indicated that they did not know.
I was quite surprised at the result, especially since participants came from working quality engineers, reliability engineers, engineering directors, system engineers, etc. Somewhere along the way, the differences and similarities between the two seem to have become muddled. Below I have collected just twelve of the many ways in which the activities are different:
RD 1 Focus on design transfer functions, and ideal function development
RE 1 Focus on design dysfunction, failure modes, failure times, mechanisms of failure
RD 2 Engineering focus, empirical models, generic models , statistics.
RE 2 Mechanistic understanding, physical models, science oriented approach.
RD3 Optimization of input-output functions with verification testing requirement
RE3 Characterization of natural phenomena with root cause analysis and countermeasure decisions
RD4 Orthogonal array testing, design of experiments planning
RE4 Life tests , accelerated life tests, highly accelerated tests, accelerated degradation tests, survival methods
RD5 Multitude of control, noise, and signal factor combinations for reducing sensitivity to noise and amplifying sensitivity to signal
RE5 Single factor testing, some multifactor testing , fixed design with noise factors, acceleration factors
RD6 Actively change design parameters to improve insensitivity to noise factors, and sensitivity to signal factors
RE6 Design-Build-Test-Fix cycles for reliability growth
RD7 Failure inspection only with verification testing of improved functions
RE7 Design out failure mechanisms, reduce variation in product strength. Reduce the effect of usage/environment
RD8 Synergy with axiomatic design methodology including ideal design, and simpler design
RE8 Simplify design complexity for reliability improvement. Reuse reliable hardware .
RD9 Hierarchy of quantitative design limits including functional limits, spec limits, control limits, adjustment limits
RE9 Identify & Increase design margins, HALT & HASS testing to flesh out design weaknesses. Temperature & vibration stressors predominate
RD10 Measurement system and response selection paramount
RE10 Time-to-failure quantitative measurements supported by analytic methods
RD11 Ideal function development for energy relate measures
RE11 Fitting distributions to stochastic failure time data. Time compression by stress application
RD12 Compound noise factors largest stress. Reduce variability to noise factors by interaction between noise and control factors, signal and noise factor.
RE12 HALT & HASS highly accelerated testing to reveal design vulnerabilities and expand margins. Root cause exploration and mitigation
There are many other differences of course, but this list should start the conversation . I would invite bloggers to submit their own opinions and lists of differences (and similarities) .
Louis LaVallee
Sr. Reliability Consultant
Ops a la Carte
Apr
15
SMTA Conference on Soldering and Reliability
April 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Silverman
SMTA Conference on Soldering and Reliability – May 15-18, 2012, Toronto
Ops A La Carte’s Peter Arrowsmith will be giving a presentation at this conference on "Improving Product Reliability Using Accelerated Stress Testing".
For more info, please Contact Us
Apr
15
IPC Conference on Test & Inspection
April 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Silverman
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".
Apr
7
2012 Reliability Symposium
April 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Silverman
May 7-11, 2012 in Santa Clara, California and via webinar
TRACK ONE – DFX TOOLS
• Design for Reliability (DfR): May 7-8
• Design for 6 Sigma (DfSS): May 9
• Design for Mechanical Reliability (DfMR): May 10
• Design for Warranty (DfW): May 11 morning
• Design for Software Reliability (DfS): May 11 afternoon
TRACK TWO – REL TOOLS: ALT/DOE/RCA
• Design of Experiments (DOE): May 7-8
• Best Accelerated Reliability Tests (BART): May 9-10
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): May 11
Each attendee will receive a copy of Mike’s book "How Reliability Is Your Product: 50 Ways to Improve Product Reliability"
Location: 990 Richard Ave, Suite 101, Santa Clara, CA 95050 and via webinar
Price: $1195 for each 2 day course, $695 for each 1 day course, $395 for each 1/2 day course.25% discount for seminars taken via web-conference
Group Rates: Every 5th registrant (or the 5th day for one registrant) is free
You can Find Out More Here.
Mar
26
Design for Robustness
March 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment
By Mike Silverman
FREE WEBINAR on Design for Robustness, Wed, April 4, 2012, 8:30am-9:30am PST
Click here to REGISTER
Robust Design (RD) Methodology is discussed for hardware development. We will compare with reliability engineering (RE) tools and practices, and highlight differences and similarities. We will present proximity to ideal function for robust design and compare to physics of failure and other reliability modeling and prediction approaches. We will show measurement selection to strongly differentiates RD and reliability engineering methods. We will show how to get the most from each methodology and show pitfalls for each set of practices. This webinar will be a lead in to Lou’s symposium classes DOE and DFSS.
For more info or to register, please Contact Us
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