Collaborative Multidiscipline Digital Circuit Board Prognostics and Health Management

This proposal explores new methods that can improve the ability to accurately predict the useful life remaining for individual digital circuit boards at any particular point in time. The capability proposed herein will improve the system maintainers' ability to identify marginal circuit boards and components, and to replace them prior to their actual failure to ensure their mission is not compromised. Our approach to fulfill this opportunity encompasses new technology that will enable maintainers to visualize both electrical and physical changes within these digital circuit boards that are indicative of pending failure, long before their actual failure in the field. This approach utilizes imaging techniques that span the DC to the EHz range of the electromagnetic spectrum to provide insight into phenomena that can neither be detected nor modeled using today's conventional test program set (TPS) and automatic test equipment (ATE) technology. This technology is highly scaleable and can support extremely complex, densely populated digital circuit boards, and can easily be added to existing and newly developed TPSs and ATE to provide such capabilities in the future.