Developing MESA: An accelerated reliability test

This paper describes the on-going research on an accelerated reliability test strategy called MESA (Multiple Environment Stress Analysis) intended to find in a fast and efficient manner (potential) reliability problems during the design phase of high volume consumer products. This test has shown promising results on its capability to provoke failures, especially on failures formerly registered as NFF (no-fault-found). The strategy applies combinations of stressors in a statistically efficient test scheme. To validate results, MESA must be able to reproduce failures with similar stressor configurations and test scheme. First pilot tests have been completed. The results show that it is possible to induce realistic, previously unknown, field failure´s in an efficient manner during the design stage. Considering that this test was the first pilot on the development of MESA, many opportunities are still left to be further explored.