Reliability growth vs. HASS cost for product manufacturing with fast-to-market requirement

摘要

This paper proposes a financial model to analyse the trade-off between the monetary benefits of reliability improvement and the costs associated with the implementation of highly accelerated stress screening (HASS) in the context of manufacturing the automatic test equipment (ATE). HASS is a reliability screening process that has been widely used as an effective tool to eliminate infant mortality and thereby improve the product mean-time-between-failures (MTBF). Furthermore, the feedback from HASS will help build quality into product and process design and thereby result in a more robust product design and production process leading to further improved MTBF. The cost-saving from improved MTBF thus obtained, is then continuously compared with the total cost of HASS implementation. The manufacturer achieves the breakeven (or better returns) as long as the HASS cost is equal to (or less than) the cost savings from the HASSed products relative to the non-HASSed products.