Model based FMEA for electronic products

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) has been developed and applied to a variety of electronic products. The FMEA method adopts a reverse thinking of the cause-failure-effect logic, the analyzing of all possible failure modes in an electric product is performed first then their failure causes are searched, which required rich experience in projects of analyst and waste time on those failure modes which unlikely happened. Besides, the environmental factors and structure of modern electronic products is complicated and the traditional FMEA cannot guarantee the adequacy of the failures analysis base on failure mechanism. Starting from the possible loadings of electronic product, a novel model-based FMEA (MB-FMEA) approach with positive thinking is proposed which finding failure mechanisms and modes of the components caused by the loadings and analyzing coupling relationships between them. The relationships between loadings and components, interactions among failure modes can be searched out by a transfer chain model. Application of the proposed approach is shown through the case of a strain test PCB which indicates the method can be used for reliability analysis and PHM of any electronic product.