Private In-House Mastering HALT & HASS Two-Day Seminar Instructor: Kirk Gray
Please note: If you are interested in offering the Mastering HALT & HASS course at your facility, please contact us for more details
Seminar Objective: This two-day seminar gives valuable insight into saving your company millions of dollars in lost opportunity by prevention of latent product defects. You will get to market faster and delight your customers by producing consistent high quality products. Participants will obtain a deeper understanding of what the HALT and HASS methods do for process and product maturity in an organization and will enable better integration of these methods into the design and manufacturing processes respectively. The instructor invites high level management as well as engineers to attend.
Why Accelerated Step Stress methods?
- History of Environmental Stress Screening (ESS) and Reliability Engineering
- Reliability Models and predictions still significant factor in traditional electronic reliability engineering
- Basics of HALT and HASS -Test to Limits + determine root causes + learn the physics of failure Þ robust products
Failure Mechanisms and Environmental Stress
- Components and stress stimuli
- Systems and stress stimuli
- Acceleration of electronic lifetimes – Can we estimate MTBF from AST results?
- Wearout modes in electronics and stress – How much life is in electronic hardware?
Use of Stress in Design Evaluation and Improvement
- Benefits, limitations
- Types of Stress Stimuli
- Levels of stress
- HALT and HASS Stress Stimuli
- Thermal
- Vibration
- Voltage, frequency margining, power cycling and other stresses for HALT
- When to use single and combinations of stresses in HALT and HASS
Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT)
- How to perform a highly accelerated life test on electronic hardware
- When to use a single stimulus or combined stimulus?
- How high a level of stress is high enough?
- Are failures under high levels of stress relevant to field reliability?
- What equipment is needed? What Personnel?
- Step Stress test at what point in the design for manufacture? At what assembly level?
- What data should we gather? How should we analyze it?
Highly Accelerated Stress Screens (HASS)
- Development and determination of appropriate stimuli levels
- Proof of Screen – How do we test to insure we don’t damage good products?
- Highly Accelerated Stress Audits (HASA)
- Examples of electronic systems HASS processes
Concerns and long term improvements in HALT and HASS
- When do we stop screening?
- How do we optimize our screen?
- Optimizing the vibration and thermal fixturing
- Feedback from screening and long term process improvement
Other Beneficial uses of Environmental Step Stress
- Benchmarking Suppliers – use step stress to select more reliable components
- Benchmarking Competitors – use step stress to evaluate your their quality and robustness.
- Use stress to precipitate and detect intermittent defects in NDF (No Defect Found) Boards
Specific Application of HALT and HASS on Company Products
- Review of verified field failures or history of past testing
- Best potential application of HALT on components, sub-systems and systems
- Specific limitations or concerns of applying HALT
About your instructor: Kirk Gray has over 40 years of experience in the electronics manufacturing industry. Mr. Gray began his career in electronics at the semiconductor level and followed the manufacturing process as a Manager in Engineering Test. He was the Environmental Stress Screening (ESS) Process Engineering Manager in manufacturing test at Storage Technology from 1989 to 1992, where he worked with Dr. Gregg K. Hobbs, the inventor of the terms and techniques HALT and HASS. Mr. Gray’s ESS process engineering team applied the HALT and HASS process and procedures into existing manufacturing production of data storage systems. In 1994 he formed AcceleRel Engineering, Inc. a consulting company. He led a wide variety of electronic companies including the bio-medical, telecommunications, power supply, and other electronic systems producers to understanding and using HALT and HASS methods. From 2003 until 2010 he was a Sr. Reliability Engineer at Dell, Inc. where he created internal classes on HALT methods and developed new HALT based test processes for desktop and portable computersKirk co-authored the book with John J. Paschkewitz, Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust Design of Electronics and Systems, Published in 2016 by John Wiley and Sons
He is a senior collaborator with the University of Maryland’s CALCE (Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering), the academic world leader in PoF based reliability. In 2010 Kirk founded Accelerated Reliability Solutions, L.L.C., a consulting company to assist and guide electronics manufacturers in practical application of HALT and HASS methods.
