Risk mitigation of reliability-critical items

During the development of new and complex electronic products, the developer identifies high-risk components by listing those components that could generate project risk based on past experience, also adding those new components with limited history. These critical items are key to product performance and, therefore, are an area of major concern during product development. Critical items are issues not totally understood by the program´s development staff, even though these individuals will be specifying and designing these items into the end product. The applications for which critical items are used can have major effects on the reliability of the critical items as well as on the products that incorporate them. Critical items are normally purchased from specialty suppliers, who design and manufacture them to a procurement specification. Critical items are classified as program risks and constitute a subset of a program´s total risk area that must be managed. Critical items are considered to be risk items because they are unique to the program (custom-designed), can embody new technologies or processes, can be state of the art (pushing the envelope of knowledge and understanding), can have higher failure rates than other components, can be life-limited, and can jeopardize safety. Critical items have enough technical and programmatic uncertainties within themselves that must be mitigated and managed by the program development staff, without adding critical item design application issues resulting from product design decisions. This paper describes a current effort that focuses on solutions for these issues