Physics of Failure Based Electronics Reliability Analysis Software

Expert analysis tools that rapidly and accurately evaluate the reliability of electronics modules, such as printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA) for component health, performance and situational self awareness, are critically important to mission effectiveness of DoD systems. To accomplish this, the interactions between electronic components need to be predicted and monitored within a comprehensive health management system (HMS). Without HMS, catastrophic loss of surveillance assets can endanger US security and military personnel. Based on Ridgetop’s extensive experiences in electronic prognostics design and health management systems for critical applications, this SBIR will provide innovative and powerful reliability analysis HMS with development of (1) effective user interface that can be used by a line engineer with little formal training in reliability to provide expert analysis and (2) a sensor reliability analysis model to analyze and identify the physics of failure (POF) models by examining critical sensors such as high failure ranking components on a simple PCBA. These endeavors will allow us to develop software algorithms identified in sensor reliability analysis model, incorporate them into the automated software package and demonstrate our validation and performance by comparing the result between the software tool and a manual analysis in a DoD relevant environment.