Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [reliability]

169 questions
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Design for long term reliability?

I need to design a small board that will go into a large piece of public infrastructure intended to last many decades. I am looking for papers and the like that give guidance on such design based on real research. This board will be much bigger for…
Olin Lathrop
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How to design electronics to last 40 years or more?

I've been reading about the Voyager space probes and am very curious about how you design electronics and instrumentation for a very long life (40+ years) without any physical maintenance. My guesses so far include: Physical protection for…
ConanTheGerbil
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Component reliability

I'm trying to design my project, Super OSD, to be as reliable as possible. I want it to work good as new when 5 years old. I hate unreliable products, environmentally it's a waste, and economically it's expensive. To that end, I'm avoiding…
Thomas O
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Hardware reliability Test

I am doing aging of my product by placing to a chamber for 2hrs 50degrees 95% humidity and 2 hours 0degrees 24/7, I have finished 1 week and the product is still okay. I am wondering what does this 1 week of under a cycle of hot and cold temperature…
jasp
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Will switching a refrigerator on and off regularly shorten its life?

For our bar, I needed a refrigerator which could operate at 10°C in order to serve ale and dark beer at the ideal temperature. Being of the DIY bent, I bought an under-bench refrigerator second-hand and built a simple system to keep it at…
jbg
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Reliability and MTBF

For an electronic device the the MTBF requirement is 4500 hours per year for 10 years, what does this MTBF mean and how to convert it into hours?
Manisha
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Comparing accelerated ageing with "real" ageing

In the electronics industry (and many others fields, but I'm interested in electronics here), it is common to submit electronic components and boards to accelerated ageing processes. The aim is to detect early-life failures and avoid putting the…
MaximGi
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What does Expected Reliability of a Circuit Mean?

I am a computer Science student, and I have to write a program that models the expected reliability of a circuit given a circuit diagram. The issue is that I have no idea what that means, and my research has only come up with things that are very…
Kyle
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Calculating reliability of a parallel redundant system

I'm trying to calculate the reliability of a system that has proven to be a bit more complicated than I thought. Here is the block diagram for the system: Every single component in this diagram is a Line Replaceable Unit with a mean downtime of 2…
trevinator
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understanding the use of MTBF

I have on a few occasions calculated the MTBF using the FITS of all the components on a BOM and something like the telcordia standard in some spreadsheet tool I was given. We get a number say 1 Million hours, and everyone nods approvingly because 1…
confused
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MIL-HDBK-217F-N2 asks for # of gates and/or transistors

New to the whole reliability prediction using MIL-217F, was wondering whether anyone had an advise/suggestion/best-practice/wisdom on how to determine the number of gates and/or transistors from a datasheet. For example, got a FPGA component…
Martinho Luterinho
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FITS in reliablity. How to convert number of failures in actual hardware testing to MTBF

In the following post What are FIT's and how they used in reliability calculations? Barry stated "There are standard formulas that convert the number of failures in a given test time to MTBF for a selected confidence level". Can you guide me to…
Ramulous
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How to specify HALT / HASS limits?

How does one go about picking the limits for a HALT test? Voltages, temperature, ramp rate, how much vibration and at what frequency? Is there a science to it or some standards? I remember one lab asking me if I had to do HALT style vibration or…
confused
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Bench top reliability test chambers

I am thinking about buying a benchtop (small, low cost, only to be used during initial design of the products) reliability test chamber. What are the key features I should check for ? I am thinking of temperature and humidity control. Where I…
TGG
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