An Approach to Online Wear Out Monitoring of PCB Interconnects in Safety-Critical Systems

Online monitoring inside electronic control units (ECU) is mandatory for all safety-critical systems. Dedicated quality and safety monitoring structures will be described that support the early detection of health problems. Interconnect wear-out and delamination are major failure causes in printed circuit boards, and sensitive detector arrangements allow for the estimation of near-future fail situations. Countermeasures like pre-emptive service actions can keep the system safe without running into emergency situations (i.e. activating redundancy), and the number of system emergency states can be reduced. This paper suggests methods for online monitoring of wear-out detectors to increase reliability and safety.