Reliability Prediction

Abstract

In this chapter we investigate the reliability of complete systems in terms of the reliabilities or the failure rates of the components or units used to construct them. The first requirement is thus to divide the system into units, each small enough to enable its reliability to be assessed directly. In general this requires subdivision down to component level so that we may use reliability data gathered from many different systems which incorporate the same components. Although we regard as components individual items such as a resistor, a transistor or a capacitor, the introduction of integrated circuits of increasing complexity has involved some alteration to the definition of a component.