Decreasing the time-to-market through virtual risk assessment and risk mitigation

摘要

One of the most time consuming activities in new product development is qualification, defined as a process to audit the ability of the design, manufacture, and assembly to meet reliability goals. More specifically, the goal is to verify whetherthe anticipated reliability is indeed achieved under actual life cycle loads for some specified length of time. Qualification is usually accomplished by testing under accelerated loads to achieve time compression.In general, qualification methods have been borrowed from the military, without knowledge of the rationale or assessment of the true benefits. In fact, prediction of field reliability from these tests has generally been quite poor. Nevertheless, theamount and length of qualification testing has increased over the years. This presentation provides a background to the qualification problem that much of industry is faced with today. Then an approach to reliability assessment is given, along with a method for virtual risk assessment and risk mitigation, which requires verylittle time and money, because the process is simulated