cEDM WORKSHOP # 32

In a growing market of complex intelligent products requiring a lifetime longer than consumer electronics (> 2 years), realising products “with predictable life time”under known loading conditions gives a competitive advantage to companies.

Evaluating potential reliability risks and predicting the lifetime at the “design stage”gives a benefit in time-to-market and both engineering and product cost by mitigating quality and reliability risks in the design phase before prototype testing, production and especially product deployment.

This workshop is the final event for the INPROVOL project, a Vlaio funded collective research project with focus on developing tools, guidelines and methodologies to support the industry in designing and manufacturing products with a better knowledge of its life time. Bart Vandevelde (imec) will present as project leader a summary of the main results of this project.

Rainer Dudek (Fraunhofer ENAS) will present unique results of a real-life thermal cycling test lasting already for more than eight years. His results allow to benchmark the different acceleration models (such as Norris-Landzberg) to the real test failure data.

Piet Watté(Signify) will present how Signify, previously known as Philips Lighting, deals with engineering models to predict the lifetime for products such as LED drivers.

Where reliability is related to the lifetime under normal operating conditions, the robustness of a product expresses the product’s capability of withstanding product life cycle conditions that go beyond normal, as-designed conditions. Geert Willems (imec), will discuss how to augment the robustness of electronics and will introduce InProVoL’s Design-for-Robustness and Robustness Testing and Qualification guidelines.