Failure Time Based Reliability Growth in Product Development and Manufacturing

The failure-in-time (FIT) rate is widely used to quantify the reliability of a electronic component. It fails to indicate the portion of the failures due to either environmental or electrical stresses or issues that are related to process/handing, manufacturing and applications. To meet this end, FIT-based corrective action driven metrics are proposed to link the failure mode (FM) with components and non-component faults. First the conventional failure mode pareto is reviewed and its deficiency is discussed. Then a new index called the failure mode rate (FMR) is introduced to monitor the FM trend and evaluate the effectiveness of corrective actions (C/As). Based on the FMR, the FIT rate is extended to non-component failure mode and further to individual failure mode in predicting the reliability of electronic products. The extended FIT rate enables product designers to narrow down the root-cause of the failure, identify the C/A ownership, and estimate the MTBF improvement. The new metrics provide a guideline for prioritizing resources to attack the critical failures with the minimum cost.