HALT Late in the Program

Abstract

Kirk and Fred discuss using HALT for a product that has been in the field and has many documented reliability issues from the initial warranty returns

Key Points

Join Kirk and Fred as they discuss the worth of performing HALT on a system after market release

Topics include:

• Determining when to perform HALT during development is critical. The product must have a working prototype that meets the environmental specifications before any stress testing begins.


• Initial field failures are extremely valuable and determining through failure analysis whether the cause of the failure is in the design or in manufacturing. If it is due to manufacturing, then a HASS process may help generate more in-house failures to understand the possible causes.


• HALT is a good way of finding the strength distribution and providing a strength benchmark for future designs. Still, the HALT must be applied to find a comparative empirical operation, and sometimes destructive limits, to know what that distribution is.


• The point of HALT is to find latent defects early in development, when the cost to make design changes is at the lowest.

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes

Please click on this link to access a relatively new analysis of traditional reliability prediction methods article from the US ARMY and CALCE titled  “Reliability Prediction – Continued Reliance on a Misleading Approach”. It is in the public domain, so please distribute freely. Attempting to predict reliability  is a misleading and costly approach to use for developing a reliable system.

You can now purchase the most recent recording of Kirk Gray’s Hobbs Engineering 8 (two 4 hour sessions) hour Webinar “Rapid and Robust Reliability Development 2022 HALT & HASS Methodologies Online Seminar” from this link.

For more information on the newest discovery testing methodology here is a link to the book “Next Generation HALT and HASS: Robust design of Electronics and Systems” written by Kirk Gray and John Paschkewitz.