Failure Mechanism Awareness

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discuss the many different failure mechanisms and the need for understanding the failure mechanisms and causes of failures.

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss why it is necessary to have an understanding of material science and the physics of failure mechanisms to do a thorough failure analysis.
Topics include:

• We expect our vendors and all of the long chain of their material suppliers to provide  a reliable component consistently, but sometimes they are unaware that their own suppliers have a production “excursion”
• Sometimes a new failure mechanism is discovered, similar to what Kirk discovered about extremely pure water used for cooling in an Ion Implanter used in semiconductor manufacturing, when a leak dripped onto a PWBA.
• IC manufacturers have proprietary formulas for encapsulating the die, but any of their chain of material suppliers can lose process control, which results in a latent defect that can lead to failures in many different products using that component.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes

Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled  “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please feel free to distribute it. Attempting to predict reliability is a misleading and costly approach to use for developing a reliable system.

Here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems,” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.