Reliability Acronyms

August 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment

There can be a lot of confusion in the reliability field when we all start talking about regular activities that have taken on acronyms for their real names. We hope this list will help those who are new to reliability. AFR – Actual Failure Rate AFR – Annualized Failure Rate or Average Failure Rate ALT [...]

Aug

25

High Reliability Issues – Low Budgets

August 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment

In today’s consulting market helping customers that have serious system reliability issues but low budgets to solve the problems can be challenging. Customers that are cash strapped are looking for the maximum bang for the buck and cannot afford to hire high paid consultants and make too many system changes in design. If they do, [...]

Aug

21

The Value of Defective Devices in the Semiconductor Industry

August 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Semiconductor manufacturing employs high volume automated production lines using very complex wafer processing technologies requiring tight controls throughout the flow. Specific physical, optical, chemical and electrical tests are being performed at several stages in the manufacturing flow, to screen out wafer batches, wafers or single devices outside of the tight distribution limits of a given [...]

Aug

5

Printed Circuit Boards and Reliability

August 5, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Potting compounds are often used on printed circuit boards to improve reliability. In spite of this added protection, adhesive failures, otherwise known as delamination, can occur and lead to substantial problems from moisture ingress. Root causes of adhesive failures may be surface contaminants, inherently weak bonding between solder mask and potting material or thermal stresses [...]

Aug

2

DFMEA acc. to VDA – 5 steps approach

August 2, 2011 | 2 Comments

VDA-German Automotive Industry Society describes process of system FMEA building. I would like to highlight 3 key areas of VDA approach: Functional analysis Failure analysis The process consists from following steps: Product breakdown to system levels Functional description of system Failure Analysis Risks Evaluation Risk Optimization First step is about definition of system. Team breakdown [...]