Abstract

Kirk and Fred discussing a question from a listener, that is pretty fundamental to HALT programs, what to do before starting to do HALT.

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss what needs to happen in a company before trying to do HALT in an organization that has not used HALT in the past.
Topics include:

• Education of Management and the design team is critical. Getting a design engineer to change anything in their design because it failed during step stress well beyond the environmental use specifications is extremely difficult without providing evidence and data supporting the high ROI that can be gained in reliability improvements with HALT.
• It is absolutely necessary to investigate or understand what the limiting component is, why it is limiting, and then show that a change of component can increase the stress operation margin.
• A good way to show the benefit of stress beyond specification is to take field returns that seem to work fine on the bench and put them in a thermal chamber and run the design validation test programs at the temperature extremes or vibration (near operational limits) and some percentage (around 30% in Kirks experience) will show failure modes reported by the customer.
• Reviewing field failures may show latent failure mechanisms that would be stimulated to detection by step stress methods. Examples are components touching and shorting, loose connectors, loose fasteners, and cold solder joints.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

SOR 788 Prework for HALTKirk Gray

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Show Notes

Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled  “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”

For more information on the newest discovery testing methodology here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.

Related Topics

SOR 010 Should We Design for HALT(Opens podcast in a new browser tab)