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Highly
Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS) System
HASS System
Vektrex designed, built, and integrated a system to perform Highly
Accelerated Stress Screening (HASS) of digital imaging PCBs and power
supplies. The system fully controls the environmental chamber during the
test, allowing the operator to program and monitor temperature ramp rates.
The system also powers the UUTs during screening, while monitoring the units
for failure. To prevent secondary damage from component failures, the HASS
system automatically shuts down UUTs that experience failures. Failure data
is automatically collected and transferred to an external database.
Expertise
Used
Custom hardware development
Additional
Information
Reliability engineers
have long recognized that many electronic devices exhibit a decreasing
failure rate during their early life. This decreasing failure rate is the
result of infant mortality resulting from device defects and manufacturing
flaws. Once all the infant mortality failures are exposed, the failure rate
diminishes to a low “useful life” rate that is relatively constant. If
devices are shipped to end-users before this infant mortality occurs,
end-users suffer from the negative operational impact of these failures.
HASS combats this by using rapid thermal cycling and vibration to quickly
expose failures. Using HASS, manufacturers can cost-effectively assure their
end-users experience low failure rates corresponding with the useful life
portion of reliability curve1.
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