Failure Analysis of Failure Analyses: The Rules of the Rue Morgue, Ten Years Later

When device customers delegate the failure analysis (FA) of field returns to a third party or, sometimes, to the manufacturer of the device, the resultant final FA reports are frequently unsatisfactory. In this paper, we investigate the reasons for this unsatisfactory outcome using three real case studies as examples. A paper of a decade ago, which proposed equivalent rules for a crime investigation and a tricky FA, is recalled. In that paper, some cardinal logical violations to those rules were identified as the most recurrent flaws in FA reports.