Reliability of electronic drivers: An industrial approach

Reliability of electronic drivers, or systems, is crucial for the business of Signify. We manufacture and sell more than a million drivers per year. Field returns taught us what failure modes are important, but this is not sufficient to provide lifetime claims for our products. Being in this business for almost a century, in order to provide detailed lifetime claims, we have established an internal reliability tool. This tool provides our designers the correct information for flawless driver development. The specially developed Electronics Reliability Tool (ERT) uses on the one hand FIT tables provided by handbooks like e.g., Telcordia and on the other hand also considers wear-out mechanisms due to e.g., lightning strikes. Validation and verification of our predictions is performed by collecting sold quantities, field returns, do extensive failure analysis and compare these values with calculated ones. Each internally designed driver is subjected to an ERT calculation. The forecasted lifetime is used as a yard stick to witness the drivers' targeted lifetime. In our presentation we will demonstrate the tool. In this paper, we describe details of how ERT calculates failure rates. We will also present the comparison between field performance and calculated values of our electronic drivers.