A critique of the Reliability Analysis Center failure-rate-model for plastic encapsulated microcircuits

As the use of plastic encapsulated microcircuits (PEM) has escalated in the electronics industry, especially in applications in which "mission" success must be accomplished at "any cost", some researchers have proposed reliability models to predict their failure rates or mean times-to-failure. One organization that took on such a challenge was the US Dept. of Defense (DoD) Reliability Analysis Center (RAC). Despite its admirable aims, the model has inherent limitations which result in unrealistic predictions, which could negatively affect parts selection, environmental management and logistics support. This paper presents an analysis of the model developed by the RAC.