PROGNOSTICS FOR ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS

摘要

By providing early information on potential equipment failures, prognostics permit maintenance to be transformed from a purely responsive (and hence largely uncontrollable) activity into one that can be planned and controlled. The ability to plan and control maintenance activities is becoming increasingly important because of the shortage of skilled personnel and the complexity of current electronic, particularly digital electronic, products. The well established benefits of prognostics for mechanical and electromechanical equipment make it promising to extend the technique to the electronics field. But there are very large differences between mechanical and electronic components in failure mechanisms, in the rate of innovation, and in the physical dimensions of the parts subject to failure that preclude direct migration of the prognostic techniques. These differences are examined in detail and an approach and several specific examples for near term application of prognostics to electronic components are presented.