Aerospace Electronics Reliability Must be Quantified to be Assured: Application of the Probabilistic Design for Reliability Concept

The recently suggested probability design for reliability (PDfR) concept can be effectively used for making a viable electronic, optoelectronic, photonic, or MEMS device (EOPD) into a reliable product. Understanding the physics-of-failure is critical to the assurance of the EOPD reliability, and the PDfR concept has therefore its experimental basis in the highly focused and highly cost-effective failure oriented accelerated testing (FOAT) geared to a physically meaningful and trustworthy predictive model that can be used for the prediction of the remaining useful lifetime (RUL) in actual operation conditions from the FOAT data. The multi-parametric Boltzmann-Arrhenius-Zhurkov (BAZ) equation suggested about a decade ago could be employed in this capacity. We focus in this analysis on some major features of the PDfR and its possible interactions with statistical approaches, when BAZ model is sandwiched between two well known statistical approaches, Bayes formula and beta-distribution. It is concluded that the application of the PDfR concept, FOAT and the multi-parametric BAZ model enables improving dramatically the state-of-the-art in the field of the aerospace EOPD reliability prediction and assurance. The general concepts are illustrated by numerical examples.