Good component failure rate data is a cornerstone of good quality reliability metric analysis. As mentioned in a previous exida whitepaper, one of the shortcomings of reliability databases has been the inability to handle variations in the operating environment. A sensor monitoring a flame and the processor interpreting the signal may be located in very different operating environments, but it is possible during analysis that the same environmental conditions are used for both. exida previously addressed this effectively by implementing common operating profiles that primarily focused on average internal product temperatures, conservative altitudes, and assumptions on whether the product was exposed to the elements.

While this method has allowed customers to produce realistic failure rates based on actual operating environments, exida recognized room for improvement. Through continued data collection from customers to understand realistic average operating conditions, as well as reviews of various environmental conditions referenced in common industry standards, exida has released the Environmental Profile Editor (EPE) as part of their OEMx™ tool, which allows customers to define environmental profiles that closely match their equipment operating conditions.

The EPE allows users to enter countless combinations of specific environmental impacts, such as high and low relative humidity, average altitude (which will compute a single event upset (SEU) relative flux density (RFD) in real time), levels of electrical overstress (EOS), corrosion, or shock and vibration. Users can also define multiple temperature cycles or internal product temperatures. Once the custom profile is created and saved in the user’s OEMx™ library, it can be easily used in their projects.

Users are still able to use the standard exida Industrial Profiles, but this new option allows users to easily view the impacts that specific environmental parameters can have on the failure rates. 

For example, a Microcontroller Core (die only) that has a failure rate of 250.3 FITs at 200 meters (exida Industrial Profile 1).

When exida Industrial Profile 1 is adjusted to increase the altitude from 200 meters to 1600 meters (roughly the elevation of Denver, CO), the failure rate more than triples.

This is just one parameter that was adjusted to show the impacts on a single component. Imagine the potential impact of several environmental parameters across numerous components in a Failure Mode and Diagnostics Effects Analysis (FMEDA)! As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, good failure data is a cornerstone of quality reliability metric analysis. The EPE allows customers to take good failure data that is regularly maintained and calibrated by experts and adapt that data to defined environmental parameters that reflect the operating environment of their equipment. 

For more information on OEMx, visit https://www.exida.com/OEMx. 

For more information and additional examples of the Environmental Profile Editor, check out the white paper and look out for an upcoming webinar on this topic.