Experimental Determination of a More Powerful Burn-In

This paper describes an experiment in which it was determined that burn-in could be made more powerful (i.e., capable of precipitating more failures in a given burn-in period) by reducing the time spent at the high temperature extreme. The number of failures precipitated in burn-in using a cycle consisting of a 2-hour non-operating cold soak and a 2-hour operating heat soak were compared to those precipitated using a 2-hour non-operating cold soak and a 4-hour operating heat soak. The shorter cycles precipitated as many failures as the longer, for an equal number of cycles. The fact that the shorter cycle required two-thirds the chamber time of the longer cycle equates to more cycles, and hence more failures removed, in a given burn-in period.