Prognostics and health management of electronics

There has been a growing interest in monitoring the ongoing "health" of products and systems in order to predict failures and provide warning to avoid catastrophic failure. Here, health is defined as the extent of degradation or deviation from an expected normal condition. While the application of health monitoring, also referred to as prognostics, is well established for assessment of mechanical systems, this is not the case for electronic systems. However, electronic systems are integral to the functionality of most systems today, and their reliability is often critical for system reliability. This paper presents the state-of-practice and the current state-of-research in the area of electronics prognostics and health management. Four current approaches include built-in-test (BIT), use of fuses and canary devices, monitoring and reasoning of failure precursors, and modeling accumulated damage based on measured life-cycle loads. Examples are provided for these different approaches, and the implementation challenges are discussed.