On the road to building-in reliability

The cycle-time pressures to reduce the time required to introduce new products, and the continued demands for decreasing product failure rates are pushing our existing reliability risk management methodology to its limits. These issues have stimulated the reassessment of our strategy and the development of an alternate approach. In this presentation, we explore the implementation of building-in reliability (BIR). We develop working definitions for BIR and the present reliability risk assessment methodology, testing-in reliability (TIR). We contrast the TIR and BIR approaches in the context of a new product introduction (NPI) process, as well as in the context of day-to-day manufacturing. We examine the TIR and BIR approaches to metallization reliability, and develop a straw man proposal for the implementation of BIR.