HALT, FOAT and their role in making a viable device into a reliable product

Despite all the today's effort, devices and systems that underwent the highly popular highly-accelerated-life-testing (HALT), passed the existing qualification tests (QT) and survived the burn-in testing (BIT), often fail in the field. Are these tests, specifications and practices adequate? If not, could they be improved to an extent that for a product that passed the QT and survived the appropriate burn-in tests (BIT), there is a quantifiable and sustainable way to assure that it will perform satisfactorily, in a failure-free fashion, in the field? Do industries and particularly aerospace electronic and photonic industries need new approaches to qualify their products? This is especially important when high reliability is a must and when the performance of various non-electronic systems depends heavily on the electronic and photonic equipment reliability. It has been recently suggested [1???4] that probabilistic design for reliability (PDfR) concept, based on the highly focused and cost-effective failure-oriented-accelerated-testing (FOAT) and effective and physically meaningful predictive modeling (PM), might be an appropriate way to dramatically improve the state-of-the-art in the field.