To conclude that a device meets reliability standards for commercial use, reliability test engineers have several responsibilities:
■■ Determining if a device will survive environmental stresses and continue to meet specifications
■■ Answering customer questions about device lifetime (MTBF, MTTF)
■■ Providing key insight into device fit for certain high reliability applications (mil/aero, automotive, etc.) Creating statistically relevant results requires sufficient sample sizes of the test devices. The nature of stress-measure cycling over many devices necessitates multi-channel parallel test with automated data evaluation