Reliability Analysis - Part 1

Reliability analysis is a very important aspect in electronics design. Reliability analysis basically decides the operability and sustenance of the system or a component in a system. The reliability analysis helps to identify the life time of a system. So, once your design is done and you are ready to release for fabrication, you perform reliability analysis to estimate the life time and operability of the design. This is more of a predictive analysis and sometimes your designs might operate in a different scenario than what is used during reliability analysis. The reliability analysis before the design release helps predict the failures beforehand, take necessary measures and succeed in product design. The risks associated with the design can be predicted early using reliability analysis. Some of the analysis done as a part of the reliability analysis is,

1. Derating Analysis

2. Failure Mode and Effects analysis (FMEA) - Design Level

3. Failure Mode and Effects analysis (FMEA) - System Level

4. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

5. Risk Analysis

6. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

There are several other analyses performed but the above analyses are very popular and are regularly used in electronics designs. Reliability engineering is a separate domain in electronics engineering and there are several experts out there in the industry who work on these aspects. There are several automation tools to perform this analysis, especially MTBF. MTBF here basically is a statistical approach which gives a prediction of the life time of the product. Most of the designers prefer to use excel based simple power calculations for analysis like derating.