Towards An Automated System Integration of

Physical Stress Simulation and Diagnostic

Engineering for Electronic Equipment
An introduction to a focused approach to diagnostic engineering of
electronics subjected to thermal and vibration effects.

Val Khaldarov
CEMSol, 60 E. Rio Salado Parkway, Suite 900, Tempe, AZ USA
Val.Khaldarov@CEMSol.com
BACKGROUND
Early Quality Reliability Engineering disciplines
which date back to World War II have come up with
a traditional view of Quality, Reliability & Durability
(QRD) product life cycle for electronics. It is usually
represented with a classic “Bath Tub” Failure Rate
Curve made up of the sum of three different
phenomena – infant mortality, randomness, and wear
out.
Figure 1: The “Bath Tub” Failure Rate Curve
In Figure 1 we see that early failures during product’s
life occur due to mortality issues. We then enter a
second phase with a period of a fairly stable failure
rates which occur due to random events or chance
problems. Finally, we eventually come to a point
where electronic equipment starts to wear out and be
at the end of its life.
This approach has actually led us to where many
organizations are today with a focus on three separate
individual life style phases. It has led companies
create separate engineering groups within an
organization – quality team which deals with the
early portion of its life cycle, reliability group for the
middle portion, and durability test group to figure out
wear out type of issues.
I. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE
TRADITIONAL QRD VIEWPOINT?
Two major problems arise from the above approach.
First, it creates a typical shortcoming of “Over the
Wall Engineering” where problems found by the
downstream groups have to be fed back to the earlier
groups for resolution. These feedback loops add time
and cost to the product development process.
A second problem arises from the fact that the three
failure curves shown in Figure 1 did not turn out to
be totally independent issues but actually interrelated.
The “Bath Tub” turned out to be an inaccurate and
misleading arisen from actuarial assumptions with
simplified data while producing three separate
curves.
When we did failure analyses and we saw the reasons
parts fail we saw that manufacturing variation or
error or service issues could cause latent problems
throughout the life of the product for many years. We
also saw that weak designs or designs that were used
in over the stress point situations would start to wear
out prematurely sometimes as early as the first few
months into each usage life and we had all kind of
conditions that we had to waiver under. And then we
saw that what should be called a true random failure
in the reliability realm were actually things that
should be considered relatively rare -- acts of god and
war. Things like your vehicle or a system is in the
accident or a fire or caught in a hurricane or tornado
some kind of act of nature came out and caused a
failure to occur which took that unit out of service.
And when we look at these things and we add these
curves up together, we don't get a nice simple clean
bathtub curve, we get this irregular and dirty and all
this is actually go to a reliability physicist who is
actually trying to understand why this product is
taken up to here in this point in its life and not here.
Was it certain time of year, weather conditions,
temperature conditions, and things of that nature.
Was it related to the way a different customer used
my products?
Figure 2: Real Failure Rate Curve