Decreasing the time-to-market through virtual risk assessment and risk mitigation

One of the most time consuming activities in new product development is reliability risk assessment, defined as an audit of the ability of the design, manufacture, and assembly processes to meet reliability goals; that is, whether the anticipated reliability is indeed achieved under actual life cycle loads for some specified length of time. In general, qualification methods have been borrowed from the military, without knowledge of the rationale or assessment of the true benefits. In fact, prediction of field reliability from these tests has generally been quite poor. Nevertheless, the amount and length of such qualification testing has increased over the years. This presentation provides a background to the reliability risk assessment problem that much of the electronics product and systems industry is faced with today. Then an approach to reliability risk assessment and risk mitigation is given, along with a virtual method, which requires very little time and money, because the process is simulated.