Advancing Reliability in Electronic Product Design

Technology continues to rapidly advance at an ever increasing pace. The new advancements have resulted in simplification of some products, but even more so, new products are becoming more complex. At the same time, customer requirements for higher reliability have also been rapidly advancing. More complex products and higher reliability are making it tougher to provide longer warranties, lower failure rates and longer life. In addition to that, the pressure is also on engineering to reduce development time and lower product cost. Unfortunately, I believe that the present methods of reliability and design engineering will not be sufficient to keep pace.

To help meet that challenge, reliability engineering needs to advance its capabilities and move more of its work up front into the early concept and design phases. The achievement of that goal will require changes in the role and structure of reliability engineering.