Cost effective accelerated testing

HALT/HAST (highly accelerated life test/highly accelerated stress test) is being implemented by various industries, in developed countries. It greatly reduces the time of design, development and testing. However, the high cost of HALT/ HAST test chambers is an impediment in adoption of HALT by small or medium sized industries. In addition, availability of these chambers is very poor at test laboratories established in developing countries. This paper shares an experience of implementation of HALT concept with the available resources in a small or medium industry. It is observed from the results that one can derive the advantages of HALT/HAST even though one does not have costly HALT/HAST test chambers. Further, it is observed that HALT has been able to precipitate various design weaknesses at a very early stage of design with few samples and in very short test duration.