Is your product truly safe for its entire lifespan? While reliability engineering teaches us about "Useful Life"—the period before device failure rates rapidly increase—this crucial concept has often been overlooked in functional safety for electronics. In fact, failure rate predictions are only valid during the Useful Life.
When the FMEDA method was developed in the late 1980s, the prevailing belief was that electronic components, lacking moving parts, would last for decades. Consequently, the "Useful Life" metric wasn't initially a standard part of functional safety analysis.
However, decades of experience and research have revealed that electronic components do have useful life limitations that significantly impact long-term reliability. Many modern components come with specific useful life data that are vital for designers making critical component selections. Recognizing this, some advanced FMEDA tools now incorporate Useful Life metrics. This webinar will show an example of how Useful Life metrics are determined and applied for a simple design using an FMEDA tool.
Dr Daniel Alley (Dan) has over 40 years of design experience in hardware, FPGA, and firmware development for industrial control products, communication systems, and signal processing for General Electric, Rockwell Automation, Northrup Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. His PhD was in Autonomous Vehicles at the University of Virginia followed by his career spent in industry with over 2 dozen US patents issued in his name.