ABSTRACT
An electronics assembly company wanted to guarantee the reliability of ceramic capacitors in its product. The application of design of experiments (DoE) to reliability assurance requires an understanding of reliability principles and accelerated testing methods. To evaluate reliability in a designed experiment, some type of reliability metric must be used as a response. The use of reliability as a response in a designed experiment is not new; it has not been used widely by reliability engineers in the few decades. The combination of inner arrays of design and manufacturing conditions with outer arrays of environmental and operating conditions is a potentially powerful tool, and its exploitation for reliability improvement is only beginning. The use of DoE for reliability improvement is not intended to replace good reliability theory, such as failure distribution and acceleration models, but it can help organize and analyze this type of knowledge.
