Design of Halt and Environmental Stress Screening Procedures for High Reliability Electronic Products to Reduce Life Cycle Costs

Reliability is one of the main salient assets of modern electronic systems and its improvement is of utmost importance in manufacturingof high-reliability electronic products. The only possible means of improving the operational characteristics of electronic systems and reducing their overall lifecycle costs is improving their reliability. This is possible through designing in reliability at the design and verification stage, and planning a thorough testing program to achieve maximum reliability at minimum costs. Highly accelerated life testing in the initial stages of development and environmental stress screening programs for the later stages of product manufacturing and testing are practical tools in the hands of reliability engineers to achieve this goal. In this paper, the effectiveness of screening programs is analyzed based on which optimum highly accelerated life testing procedures for discovering flaws in design and manufacturing early in the products design and manufacturing are carried out, and environmental stress screening procedures for the testing of manufactured products are planned and implemented for high reliability electronic products. Results of actual HALT and ESS testing are presented.