Abstract:

Over the years the, the process of burn-in gas deteriorated into an insurance policy to check reliability or satisfy customer imposed requirements.  Burn-in procedures are often conducted, without any prior verification of the nature of the defects to be precipitated, the failure mechanisms active in the device, their sensitivity to steady state temperature stress, or any quantitative evidence of the improvement achieved by the process.  In fact, current failure data indicates that burn-in prior to usage does not remove many failures and on the contrary may cause failures due to additional handling.  This paper examines the problems in the existing burn-in methods and presents a physics of failure approach to burn-in.
 

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