Physics of Failure: an Introduction

The physics of failure (POF) is an approach to designing reliable products to avoid failure, based on the knowledge of root cause failure mechanisms. It is based on failure reliability technology that studies the failure regularities from the failure reasons and failure mechanisms of the products. A clear understanding of the physics-of-failure is necessary in applications that afford little opportunity for testing. The purpose of this paper is to present POF as a reliability analysis or science which studies failure mechanisms.