Improved step stress accelerated life testing method for electronic product

Quantitative accelerated life testing (ALT) is designed to quantify the life characteristics of the product under normal use conditions. Usually, step stress ALT (SSALT) method is firstly selected to do quantitative ALT planning when resource limitations on the availability of test prototypes and/or test equipment pose a restriction on the number of samples that can be tested. This paper describes the main limitations of the SSALT method and proposes an improved SSALT method for electronic product. Without changing ALT planning, the new method could be used to duplicate the failure, verify whether all samples can exhibit survivability well at all stress levels and whether failure modes occurring at high stress level are differ from those occurring at low stress level, and to help confirm the leading cause for failures without additional testing. A case study is given to illustrate the implementation of the new method. Guidelines for the new method are then provided in the discussion and conclusions.

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