Life consumption monitoring for electronics prognostics

Life consumption monitoring is a prognostic method to assess the remaining life of a product in its actual life-cycle environment by continuously or periodically measuring the product´s performance parameters and environmental conditions. This work discusses a generic process to conduct a life consumption monitoring for electronic products. Two case studies on a circuit card assembly in an automobile under-hood environment are presented as application examples of the process. Temperature and vibration were identified as the dominant factors for the failure of the circuit card assembly. The environmental loads were monitored using a data recorder and the remaining life of the card assembly was estimated using physics-of-failure based stress and damage models. The predicted remaining life of the circuit card assembly correlated well with the measurement results.