Abstract:

This paper presents the use of techniques for simulating product qualification as well as for product testing of electronic hardware to be used in the United States Marine Corp's Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle. The goal of integrating "up-front" virtual life assessment into the development environment is to increase overall product reliability and decrease overall product cost by decreasing build-test-fix time and promoting optimized tradeoff analysis early in the design stage. Relevant problems included: the positioning of a large microcircuit near the center of the board, weakness to shock loading, and life expectancies of around six (6) to eight (8) years. Failure in the form of electrical opens and/or increased circuit resistance due to thermo- mechanical and random vibration induced fatigue of solder interconnects was predicted as the dominant wearout failure mechanism. A week long qualification test is proposed to verify the virtual life assessment results of the life cycle loads.

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