Decision support system for high temperature electronics

Small signal electronics have traditionally been designed to operate at temperatures below 85/spl deg/C. This has become a severe constraint in the development of electronic systems for next generation products, such as the hybrid electric vehicle, and the high speed civil transport. Recent advances in components and packaging material technology have now made possible the design of electronic systems which will operate at ambient temperatures of 200/spl deg/C, without the need for active cooling. However, cost-effectively ensuring that these systems are reliable at these temperatures over a typical lifetime of a decade or more requires that reliability considerations be addressed in the earliest phases of design. In this paper we will discuss a methodology and an associated decision support system that has been developed to facilitate design-for-reliability specifically for high temperature electronic systems. This system is the only design-for-reliability decision support system that can assess the time to failure of electronic system designs at high temperatures based on models of the fundamental mechanisms by which systems fail at those temperatures.