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Reliability for Electronic Designers


... a 2-day course for developers of electronic products:
  • What is wrong with conventional wisdom on reliability engineering?
  • What is the real meaning of Mean Time Between Failure?
  • Why is it possible to perform a reliability prediction, but impossible to predict reliability?
  • What analysis can be used to evaluate the robustness of an electronic design?
  • What should be done to ensure mechanical reliability of electronic equipment?
  • Why is reliability demonstration testing fundamentally inadequate during development?
  • Why should prototypes be tested beyond specification limits (as in HALT)?
  • Why should reliability not be the responsibility of logistics or maintenance?
  • What can be learned from the latest reliability engineering standards?

The objective of this course is to provide design engineers with practical knowledge on how to prevent or at least to
reduce the occurrence of failures in electronic products.  The course combines conventional wisdom with a modern
approach to reliability engineering, indicating that many “industry standard” practices are incorrect and misleading.
It argues that the focus of reliability engineering should be on value adding “engineering” activities, and not on
“accounting” activities.  Reliability can be defined as the “absence of failures".  The emphasis of reliability engineering
should therefore be on "failure prevention" during development and production, and not on "failure correction" during operations.  Mathematics and statistics play a minor role in the course, with emphasis placed on tools and techniques applicable during the development phase of electronic products.  Practical examples are used to illustrate “how” to
perform individual reliability tasks.


Course contents
What is reliability engineering? Worst case circuit analysis
The real meaning of MTBF
 Component derating analysis
Why do products fail?
 Mechanical failure of electronics
Reliability programmes
 Reliability testing and HALT
Systems reliability and modelling
 Failure data analysis
Can you really predict reliability?
 Examples of good practices
Failure mode and effects analysis Management of reliability
Fault tree analysis
 References