Speakers
Description
The use of new electronic hardware technologies is a challenge for the development of reliable equipment in aeronautic and space. The absence of flight heritage on the performances of new technologies hinders the spread of their use to highly demanding environments, where they could be a game changer. This paper describes a mathematical approach as well as a test methodology to assess the reliability of electronic equipment subjected to a set of different aeronautic or space mission profiles (thermal cycling, humidity cycling, vibrations and so on). The objective is to be able to assert whether the selected components of the boards composing an equipment comply with the reliability expectations or not, while taking into account both the mission profile of the equipment as well as the targeted assembly process of the product. The approach can be divided into 5 steps:
- listing the critical components and assessing their failure mode,
- allocate a reliability objective, design an accelerated test considering the mission profile of the equipment,
- design a zero-failure-test to integrate reliability requirements
- and finally the test itself.
The strategy consists in deriving the reliability requirement assigned to the equipment by the customer at the component level. It allows a more accurate reliability assessment than the same approach at equipment or board level.
Many components can be tested, increasing the statistic consistency of the test. The test vehicle can be designed as soon as a preliminary Bill of Material (BOM) is released making a reliability assessment possible during the first phases of the project (before the Preliminary Design Review). This methodology has been applied successfully during the development of an equipment for aeronautic application. Finally, Thales has implemented the whole approach in a software briefly presented in order to design a test in a click.
