True Reliability Versus Inspection Efficiency

It is shown that in certain hardware programs, the product reliability can be explicitly related to the efficiency of manufacturing operations, in terms of fraction of operations correct out of total carried out, to the efficiency of inspection operations, as a fraction of erroneous manufacturing operations, and related implicitly to the design margins for the product. Expressions are derived that relate these parameters to both product reliability and product acceptance rate. A method is suggested for measuring and inspection efficiency so that an upper limit to product reliability can be derived from product-acceptance data.