Lifecycle based reliability growth management for electrics designs

This paper proposes a reliability management method for new electronics development under fast time-to-market requirements. We approach the reliability growth across the product life cycle from design, manufacturing, assembly, and field operation in the context of distributed manufacturing paradigm. The management method consists of three modules including corrective actions, reliability prediction, and resource optimization. The decision-makers can leverage the new method to perform reliability analysis, implement corrective actions, and monitor the reliability growth rate. The proposed method is demonstrated on the design of Automatic Test Equipment, and the result show that reliability can be effectively improved through effective implementation of corrective actions. Another interesting observation is that corrective actions could be applied to those failure modes even if they show a downturn trend.