The design of a test method to identify reliability problems of consumer electronic product during early phases of development

The rapid advances in technology, the increase on the number of manufacturers and high consumer expectations make today?s consumer electronics market highly competitive. Under these competitive market conditions, companies try to keep and increase their quality and reliability level of their products. Design to manufacturing time is becoming shorter and shorter. The classical approach for reliability testing cannot maintain desired reliability levels for products due to rapid changes on design such as cost down works, alternative components and additional new features and also such methods cannot respond with enough speed. A new approach for reliability must be developed in order to get trouble-free and robust products, which satisfies customer needs for a long time and this approach must show how reliable the new product is against the old one. A novel parameter, called maturity level (ML) or failure risk factor (FRF), which is given by 1-ML, is demonstrated to incorporate such factors and it is combined with traditional reliability prediction methods. Specifically, the new approach takes into account the qualitative reliability tests, which include hardware and software tests, performed during the research and development (R&D) stage and combines them with the other reliability prediction methods by using basic approaches. As a result, the new approach gives more accurate predictions compared with traditional prediction methods. Therefore, reliability analysts can determine the reliability and return rate of their products more accurately with this prediction model.