Various kinds of failures may occur in electronic products because of their life cycle environmental conditions including temperature, humidity, shock and vibration. Failure mechanism models are available to estimate the time to failure for most of these failures. Hence if the life cycle environment of a product can be determined, it is possible to assess the amount of damage induced and predict when the product might fail. This paper presents a life consumption monitoring methodology to determine the remaining life of a product. A battery powered data recorder is used to monitor the temperature, shock and vibration loads on a printed circuit board assembly placed under the hood of an automobile. The recorded data is used in conjunction with physics-of-failure models to determine the damage accumulation in the solder joints due to temperature and vibration loading. The remaining life of the solder joints of the test board is then obtained from the damage accumulation information.

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