Performance degradation analysis using principal component method

This paper describes a strategy of using the principal component method to analyze the performance characteristics of products. In particular, the authors relate performance characteristics to reliability and propose a relative reliability metric, which is useful in reliability screening. The importance of individual performance characteristics to reliability is evaluated. The importance indicates the critical characteristic and the direction in which efforts should be made to improve the reliability of a product. They use score plots to identify degradation modes and determine dominant degradation mechanisms. The principal component method is applied to analyze the degradation data of infrared light emitting diodes