Life Testing and Burn-In Systems

Life Testing is used to evaluate the long-term performance of a product during development, for production monitoring using a sampling system and, for high value products, in full production test. The test is usually carried out under maximum rated operating conditions and can take a long time to give meaningful results, thus higher stresses (beyond data sheet limits) may be used to accelerate the life test.

Highly Accelerated Life Test (HALT) allows problems to be identified more quickly, and also substantially reduces the Life Test equipment capacity required. However, it is important to analyze the failures and carefully evaluate the results for relevance to actual failure mechanisms since the higher stresses may introduce additional non-typical failure modes.

When throughput is important DRI provides the total environment to stress your product. We understand how to maintain a uniform temperature distribution across your large product, or an n array of products installed in a fixture. Using thermal analysis of forced air flow, heat sinks and thermal bars, we can insure your product’s temperature accuracy down to a few degrees.

Under temperature extremes, the components used in the fixturing and on the product itself expand at different rates. The coefficient of thermal expansion of each component becomes a critical design consideration for the fixturing and connectors. At DRI we design solutions to go to 105 degrees and have designed fixtures to 125 degrees using the right techniques, connectors and materials to successfully test your product.