In exida’s Component Reliability Database (CRD), every component includes a Useful Life expressed in years and/or cycles.
This post, drawing from exida's whitepaper [1] on how environmental factors impact component reliability, shows how Useful Life, like failure rates, is affected by factors such as temperature…
Your product's safety and reliability depend on the constant battle between component stress and strength throughout its useful lifetime. This dynamic is influenced by everything from design and manufacturing to usage and environment. Crucially, without…
Earlier this year, exida announced major enhancements to the SILstat™ product.
SILstat completes the Safety Lifecycle by providing users with a tool to manage and maintain their operation and maintenance data for their installed safety systems and associated field devices.
SILstat is designed to easily…
This is a question I have often been asked in the past. Most people I have spoken with don’t have a good appreciation of what this means and the purpose. From the IEC61511 perspective, designers of Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) are required to justify the selection…
An exSILentia user just reached out to me inquiring how their SIL verification results changed with changing Site Safety Index (SSI), even though they did not include the SSI in the failure rate selection. Though it is not a frequent question, I can…
This is an important question. Mining today is a lot more modernized and automated than in the past, yet there are still accidents occurring. The Impala hoist accident in South Africa in November of 2023 is an example, where there was a tragic loss of life when the hoist…
Threat Modeling (TM) is a process for identifying and prioritizing potential cybersecurity threats to software, hardware or a system. Contributing to the high value of TM is:
Has your FMEA entered the realm of the paperwork exercise that we force ourselves to do for no real reason than someone says we must do it?
I have enjoyed analysis using FMEA. I first learned it existed when I was working for Ford. FMEA was the first Ford…
I have been asked this question many times by various clients over the years. This comes down to whether a perfect proof test is assumed or not. Let us remember that Mission Time is defined as the amount of time we expect a set of SIF equipment to run until a…
I find YouTube to be a good source of information on many subjects. Want to know how to fix a widget? There are probably a few videos on that exact subject. Technical subjects are also there. I was searching on “FMEA” and found an interesting looking video on the “Read More...
When it comes to developing secure products, the IEC 62443 series of standards provide a lot of guidance and best practices which can be applied while developing the product. This is essentially an approach to designing security into the product rather than trying to add it on at the…
I learned about the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) process for designs some decades ago. I was Supervisor of an Embedded System development group. There seemed to be a lot of evidence that an FMEA on a design was a really good way to identify issues (problems) early…
Good component failure rate data is a cornerstone of good quality reliability metric analysis. As mentioned in a previous exida whitepaper, one of the shortcomings of reliability databases has been the inability to handle variations in the operating environment. A sensor monitoring a flame and the processor interpreting the signal…
Memory mapping is a technique used in computer systems to manage memory resources safely, it involves creating a virtual address space that corresponds directly to the physical memory or to a portion of it, this allows programs to access memory in a way that is…
I had an engineer from a European Certification Body ask me why exida would bother paying any attention to these failure rate numbers, especially on mechanical devices? He said that he does not know anyone who actually uses them! To answer why exida pays attention to failure rates, we…