Simultaneous Determination of Optimal Burn-in Time and Its Mean Residual Lifetime For Highly Reliable Products

Abstract

Nowadays many products are designed to operate for years or longer without a failure even under stressful conditions, the traditional burn-in test over a short period of time to collect time-to-failure or go/no go data becomes rather ineffective. Thus, within only a short period of internal life testing, how to provide on-line real-time information for (i) determining optimal burn-in time, and (ii) assessing mean residual life (MRL) are two great challenges to manufacturers. In this talk, we use a diffusion process to describe the degradation path of a suitable quality characteristic, which is highly correlated with the product's lifetime. A decision rule for classifying a unit as a normal or a weak unit is proposed, and then an economic model is used to determine the optimal termination time of a burn-in test. Next, we propose a method for assessing a product's mean esidual life (MRL) of the passed units. Finally, an example of an electronic product, namely light emitting diode (LED), is used to strate the proposed procedure.