Educational tool for capacitor lifetime prediction

One of the more challenging tasks in the education of electronics engineering is aiding students to grasp the influences of environmental effects on the degradation of electronic components and how these affect the overall behavior and lifetime of the final design. The tool presented in this paper estimates capacitor lifetimes under given environmental stress using five different mathematical models. Contrary to classical approaches, it applies these models over short, linearized segments of the component lifetime and in a weighted manner, resulting in a closer to reality estimation in the final results. The tool is used to aid student to better understand the importance of component selection based on reliability factors in safety critical designs.