Failure Oriented Accelerated Testing (FOAT), Boltzmann Arrhenius Zhurkov Equation (BAZ), and their Application in Aerospace Microelectronics and Photonics Reliability Engineering

The best engineering product is, in effect, the best compromise between its cost, time-to-market and reliability. No successful compromise can be achieved nor can an adequate performance of an electronic or photonic product be assured, if the product's reliability is not quantified. Since nothing is perfect, and the difference between a highly reliable product and an insufficiently reliable one is “merely” in the difference between the levels of their never-zero probabilities of failure, reliability of such products should be evaluated on the probability basis. In the analysis that follows it is shown how this could be done using highly focused and highly cost effective failure-oriented accelerated testing (FOAT) geared to a physically meaningful and flexible Boltzmann-Arrhenius-Zhurkov (BAZ) constitutive equation. FOAT and BAZ are the core of the recently suggested probabilistic design for reliability (PDfR) concept. The following practically important problems are addressed, as suitable examples of the general concept: assessment of the static fatigue lifetime of an optical specialty-fiber intended for high-temperature operations; predicted time-to-failure (TTF) of an electron device subjected to temperature cycling; TTF of a solder material subjected to the combined action of low-temperatures and random-vibrations; and TTF of an electron device under the combined action of an elevated humidity and voltage. Future work should include experimental verification of the theoretical findings, as well as new applications of the suggested technique.