Looking for failure is a bittersweet endeavor -- it goes against human nature to look for something that we don't want to find. Our in-house process improvements are bringing us closer and closer to the goal of zero failures. Some days everything we make is perfect, but when it's not, our job is to find the fault before it gets to the customer. These new gimbaled test jigs run every APM through a rigorous test cycle to validate its performance. In addition, we are constantly working on things like paste handling, material inspection, plus the addition of other super-bad-ass expensive machines that do stuff.
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@Harry,
ESS stands for "Environmental Stress Screening". The premis is that not all parts of the same kind are created equal. There are those that will fail "early in life" (infant failure), those that will fail between the "early in life" failures and the "wear out" failures, and those that last until "wear out" (end of life) occurs. There is also another kind of defect called "latent defect" which is a defect that is caused during manufacture, but is not severe enough to be detected during ESS and only appears later before "wear out" occurs. Electro Static Discharge (ESD) induced failures are one type of latent defect because they are not severe enough to fail early on, but occur unexpectedly, as stated before, before "wear out" occurs.
Regards,
TCIII
Interesting, I'm reading ESS is some kind of way to force a part weakness to show up now rather than later? ESS is acronym for?
In the Aerospace Industry they use a "bed of nails" to test for continuity and to eliminate shorts during the pwb build-up process. Once the pwb is ready to be fired up. there is check of the power input lines to ensure that they are not shorted or open. After power is applied and the board has booted up, operational firmware is usually loaded and the board is ready for ESS.
ESS is used to eliminate infant failures and move the board failure rate towards the bottom of the failures vs time bathtub curve.
Regards,
TCIII
What kind of super-bad-ass expensive machines you folks workin with!? :)