The study on application of HALT for DC/DC converter

DC/DC converters play the key roles in electronic systems. They often undergo the severest stress and are most likely to fail. So the research of reliability and failure analysis to the DC/DC converters is important to make products reliable and to maintain its performance under different loads. Highly accelerated limit test (HALT) is an advanced accelerated test method for reliability evaluation. In this paper, the concept meanings of HALT technology are introduced. The principle and procedure of the application of HALT for DC/DC converter are discussed. In the study, the test samples were subjected to progressively higher stress levels. Thermal dwells, rapid temperature transitions, vibration, electrical stress and a combination of different stresses were employed to evaluate the inherent defects of DC/DC converters. Several key parameters such as output voltage, efficiency and ripple were monitored to identify the operating limits and failures of the samples. Besides, in order to obtain the failure modes and mechanisms and give the improvement approaches, the method of failure analysis on the failed samples is introduced.