Finding Failures and Firefighting

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discuss new product market release schedule pressures, and then after customers start finding reliability issues, the actual firefighting begins. Many times, those who quickly can fix the causes of failures, the firefighters, get many more accolades than those who find and mitigate product weaknesses that become failures during the design and development phase.

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss the common excuses for not doing enough analysis and testing to discover latent defects before market release, if it does happen. Many products are robust designs and the latent defects are introduced during assembly and final testing.
Topics include:

• Suppose HALT reveals significant differences in environmental step stress limits in a small group of 3 to 5 samples. In that case, that is likely an indication of a wide distribution in a component or subsystems that some percentage of the weakest of the distribution will intersect with the worst-case end-use stress environment, even though there are not enough samples to do a statistical analysis with.
• CAD systems can very well analyze how component variations will affect the functions of the circuits, but they are based on ideal averages and not the real parametric variations in high-volume production.
• Understanding the root cause of failure is of utmost importance. Even the most robust designs can only be reliable if the manufacturing processes are capable and consistent. This underscores the weight of the responsibility as manufacturing professionals to ensure the quality and reliability of our products. 
• Real firefighters saving a person from a burning building generally get much more publicity and accolades than the inventors of the smoke detector, which have saved magnitudes of more people by alerting them at the beginning of a fire in time to escape.

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.

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”. It is in the public domain, so please distribute freely. Trying to predict reliability for development is a misleading a costly approach.

You can now purchase the most recent recording of Kirk Gray’s Hobbs Engineering 8 (two 4 hour sessions) hour Webinar “Rapid and Robust Reliability Development 2022 HALT & HASS Methodologies Online Seminar” from this link.

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.

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