By Dr. Syeda Sadaf Akber
Ensuring reliability of electronic designs has become increasingly important and driven by competitive market forces. The Design for Reliability (DfR) seminar held at the Dadabhoy Institute of Higher Education by Mr. Ken Powell who is a Risk and Reliability Engineering specialist and currently working as a Director of Reliability Engineering, Philips Medical Systems, The Netherlands.
He introduced the challenges and advantages of the Design for Reliability process and explored real world examples and analysis of when and how DfR is applied during concurrent product development. It detailed how DfR is applied in the Aerospace, Subsea Oil & Gas and Medical Devices technology segments to ensure robust design, best in class product and system reliability, speeds time to market and lowers warranty cost therefore increasing company profitability.
Key DfR processes explained were Requirements Management, Failure Modes Effects and Analysis, Accelerated Life Test (ALT) and Probabilistic Data Analysis using the Weibull Distribution.
