An approach to designing accelerated life-testing experiments

This paper presents and evaluates an approach to designing accelerated life testing (ALT) experiments. We believe that knowing the design limits of the test item is critical to successful ALT. Unfortunately, effective methods do not exist for analytically predicting the design limits of most electronic items; therefore, the basis of our approach is a destructive evaluation performed on a small number of test items to measure their design limits. Once the design limits have been established, environmental stress levels can be tailored to achieve the objectives of the accelerated life test, which may include optimizing it for greater acceleration, accuracy, and/or statistical confidence. The approach is oriented toward ALT of electronic systems using multiple stresses and is most applicable to low-cost, high-volume production items. We have evaluated our approach by applying it to a commercial off-the-shelf single-board computer. Results from this application demonstrate that the approach can be quite effective for designing successful ALT experiments.