Semiparametric evaluation of first-passage distribution for step-stress accelerated degradation tests

In reliability engineering, different types of accelerated degradation tests have been used to obtain reliability information for evaluating highly reliable or expensive products. The step-stress accelerated degradation test (SSADT) is one of the useful experimental schemes that can be used to save the resources of an experiment. Motivated by the SSADT data for operational amplifiers collected in Xi'an Microelectronic Technology Institute, in which the underlying degradation mechanism of the operational amplifiers is unknown, we propose a semiparametric approach for SSADT data analysis that does not require strict distributional assumptions. Specifically, the empirical saddlepoint approximation method is proposed to estimate the items' lifetime (first-passage time) distribution at both stress levels included and not included in the SSADT experiment. Monte Carlo simulation studies are used to evaluate the performance and illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach. Finally, the proposed semiparametric approach is applied to analyze the motivating data set.