Reliability Assessment of Electronic Components

Abstract

Quality of the product is important for the industries. Reliability is also one of the quality goals. Quality and reliability are co-inside with each other. Reliability of individual component and whole product is very important for overall life cycle of the system. Early identification of the failures, identify the different stress on the components, different reliability methods and analysis are very useful. There are reliability tests that recommend putting product under extreme environmental stress conditions, so as to purposely fail it. Such an experimental approach gives an indication of first failure mode for any electrical or environmental stresses. Finally, such a practical approach shall be continued during production phase at regular intervals. This is useful to understand any additional or early failure mode added due to production processes and supply chain management. This thesis demonstrates the basic concept and different terminology for reliability. Also it presents the different prediction tools and method for estimation of failure rate of the electronic components, so that reliability of each individual component and product reliability is to be calculated. It also includes the software development for part stress method for estimating the failure rate, MTBF and reliability of electronic components. By using the part stress method, reliability calculations of flyback SMPS which is used to power up the numerical relay is carried out. This thesis includes simulation and experimental results of 4W flyback SMPS. For actual stress analysis of product, different environmental testing like temperature, humidity and EMI-EMC test are important. Temperature test are performed on flyback SMPS and failure of components are being observed. Overall design improvement can be done through this approach such that field failure can be minimized.