Supplier Trust Issues

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discuss supplier trust issues

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss trusting your suppliers of components and systems to send you reliable parts.

Topics include:

• Suppliers of small, discreet electronic components such as diodes, resistors, MLCC (Multi layer Ceramic capacitors) may have hundreds of customers using them in a wide variety of applications. They cannot be expected to know or adapt their products to your application.
• Every supplier has suppliers of raw materials and should have an incoming quality control of their raw materials, but how far in the supply chain do they need to check?
• A small component supplier may not have the resources to do a thorough FA on the part, and if it is damaged through ESD or from a high voltage transient spike, all they can say is it failed due to EOS (Electrical Over-stress).
• All components have operational margins in their design so that they can be manufactured in high volume, with all meeting the parametric specifications, but they will never disclose that margin, and a good way of selecting the component vendor with the most margin is to perform a HALT evaluation with mixed builds of prototypes.

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.