IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter Vol. 57, No. 1. February 2011

Table of Content

Front page:
President's Message

From the Editor

Messages from VPs:

VP Publications Report from Dr. Robert Loomis

Society News:

2011 EXCOM and ADCOM Members

Prestigious Engineer of the Year Award

Best Chapter Awards

AdCom Meeting

Nominations for IEEE Medals and Recognitions

RS seeks Administrative Committee Candidates for 2012/2013/2014 Term

Reliability Society Past AdCom Members Obituaries:
Former RS President Monshaw Dies At 84

Obituary for Ann Miller


Feature Articles:
Reliability through the Ages

Reliability Overview of Air Traffic Reliability in the National Air Space

 

 

Regular Articles:

Field Based Reliability Calculations (MTBF) – Surmounting Practical Challenges. An outside the box approach.

Applying basic and familiar reliability theory to estimating and improving the avialablity of software-intensive systems

Fault Tolerance in Web Services


PHM Articles:

Detection of Multiple Failure-Modes in Electronics using Self-Organized Mapping

 


Book Review :

Reliability Engineering Book Review


Chapter Activities:
Cleveland Chapter

Taipei/Tainan Chapter

The Denver Chapter awarded a certificate to Hobbs Engineering

Announcements:
Solicitation for Society Technical Committees

UK&RI Workshop on Reliability and Safety

WCEAM-IMS 2001



Links:
Reliability Society Home


RS Newsletter Homepage

Detection of Multiple Failure-Modes in Electronics using Self-Organized Mapping

Ultra-high reliability field applications including avionics, automobile, military and defense require prolonged operation under extreme environments without any extended downtime. Damage may be accrued in electronic systems because of thermo-mechanical environments, shock and vibration. Structural health monitoring systems are needed to maintain high level of product uptime, while ensuring reliable operation under extreme environments. Methods for fault mode classification can enable the non-destructive assessment of the underlying failure modes prior to occurrence of system failure. Common damage detection procedures currently used in electronic packages include detection of resistive opens, built in self test and use of auxiliary devices such as fuses and canaries. Diagnostic detection of resistive opens provides little insight into the pre-failure space of the device. The built in self test provides little or no insight into underlying reliability, existing failure mechanisms and remaining useful life of the device. Fuses and canaries are methods for providing advance warning mechanisms by requiring failure of the sacrificial device prior to failure of the system. Fuses and canaries provide no insight into the failure progression prior to failure of the fuse or canary.





Failure is often diagnosed by loss of functionality using techniques including the built-in self test, which provides limited insight into reliability and remaining useful life. In this project, a prognostic framework for electronic systems has been developed with neural network based self organizing maps. Figure 1 represents neuro-biological motivation to self organizing neural nets, where the brain is considered as a topologically ordered network and different regions of the brain respond to different media based on competitive learning. The presented approach resides in the pre-failure space with a focus on electronic systems with multiple failure modes. Unsupervised learning of the neural net has been used to train the neural net for identification of individual failure modes. Feature vectors have been developed based on damage pre-cursors from time-spectral measurements. The clustered damage pre-cursors have been correlated with failure modes of the underlying damage. level interconnects including SAC305, SAC405 alloys. Early classification of multiple failure modes in the pre-failure space is new. Figure 2 represent the results of classified failure modes in test assembly used in this study.

For more details contact Pradeep Lall, lall@auburn.edu, (334) 844-3424