Effortless incremental design FMEA

Design FMEA of electrical systems is a costly and labour intensive process. Ideally it would be done when the electrical system is first designed, and repeated whenever any change is made to the design. Because of the cost, this has not been possible in the past. This paper describes how an existing tool for automating electrical design failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) can be augmented to make incremental design FMEA much less of a burden for the engineer. The tool is able to generate the effects for each failure mode and to assign significance values to the effects. The first time that it is run on a design, the engineer still has quite a lot of work to do, examining the results and deciding what actions need to be taken because of the FMEA. When a change is made to the circuit, the engineer runs the FMEA tool again and receives a new report. Because of the uniformity of the reports provided by the FMEA tool, it has proved possible to write software which sorts out the failure effects which have changed from the previous analysis and only report those results to the engineer. This makes examination of the repercussions of the incremental FMEA much less effort for the engineer, and makes it feasible to perform an incremental FMEA every time the design is amended.