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Highly Accelerated Life Test & Highly Accelerated Stress Screen (HALT/HASS)

DfR Solutions has developed a partnership with Qualmark Corporation, which includes the acquisition of a Qualmark Typhoon HALT/HASS Chamber. With this acquisition, DFR Solutions is the only HALT/HASS facility in the mid-Atlantic region that can provide a full reliability program around the use of HALT which includes test interpretation, failure analysis, and corrective actions. The arrangement further augments DfR’s capabilities by providing customers not only with HALT/HASS rest results, but also with solutions to their product reliability concerns.

Please contact Edward Dodd to arrange a free consultation with DfR Solutions

DfR Solutions provides our customers assistance in HALT/HASS in four ways:

Training:

We are able to educate and explain the HALT/HASS process to your staff, your customers, and your suppliers.

Please contact Edward Dodd to request our HALT presentation

Design:

DfR’s engineering team can work with you on designing a HALT/HASS process by selecting what parameters to monitor and what environmental stressors to introduce during testing.

Please contact Ed Dodd to request DfR's Test Design Sevices

Test:

DfR Solutions recognizes that the needs of our customers are important, and offer two levels of HALT testing to meet them.

Standard

Our customers have access to our HALT chamber and a DfR Engineer to assist in fixturing and running the HALT chamber for eight hours a day

Premium

In addition to the eight hours of HALT and the assisting engineer, DfR makes our diagnostic and teardown facilities available to our customers.  These facilities include work benches, oscilloscopes, curve tracers, function generators, microscopes of varying magnification, X-ray equipment, soldering stations, etc. Premium HALT customers also enjoy complete access to DfR Solutions senior staff for consultation during the HALT activity.

Please contact Ed Dodd to schedule your HALT session

Root-Cause Analysis and Test Interpretation:

Of course, DfR Solutions understands that HALT/HASS is not just about testing. A critical aspect of HALT/HASS is analyzing the failures during the test and understanding the appropriate actions to these failures. We use our unrivaled root-cause analysis capability to provide our clients with the solutions they need to ensure their product’s quality and reliability.

If you would like more information on HALT/HASS and how to design an appropriate HALT/HASS process, please send us an email.

About HALT/HASS:

DfR Solutions can perform HALT/HASS using a Qualmark Typhoon 2.0 chamber for a wide variety of products for military, automotive, commercial and aerospace applications. The system can provide impressive thermal performance and six-degree-of-freedom, repetitive-shock vibration.

Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) and Highly Accelerated Stress Screen (HASS) are design verification tools for testing electronic and electro-mechanical products. HALT/HASS employs thermal and vibration stresses that quickly uncover design flaws and precipitates latent defects that might otherwise be exhibited as field failures and warranty problems.

HALT/HASS is not just for finding failures, but for correcting the weaknesses that caused the failures. HALT/HASS begins by gradually increasing a stress or combination of stresses, until a failure occurs. Once failures are precipitated during HALT/HASS, the root cause of the failure is determined and corrective action is implemented in order to increase the robustness of the product. Then the application of stresses is continued in order to find the next weakness. The actual functional and destruct limits of the product are found. In short, the goal of HALT/HASS is to quickly break the product and learn from the failure modes the product exhibits.

Because the stresses applied are increased until failure occurs, HALT/HASS needs a relatively small sample size. With HALT/HASS, stresses are applied incrementally over time. For the thermal and vibration stresses, this means starting with cold step stressing, then hot, then rapid thermal extremes, then vibration, followed by a final combined thermal/vibration environment.

More recently, the concept of HALT/HASS has expanded to include other stressors, such as variations in electrical load (voltage, current), operating frequency, relative humidity, etc. To describe this multitude of environments, some use the term multiple environmental overstress test (MEOST). Regardless of the terminology, by incorporating HALT/HASS into your design process, design weaknesses that would otherwise cause customers problems in the use of the product are discovered early in the product lifecycle, saving companies the cost of field failures, returns, and lack of credibility.

Benefits of HALT/HASS:

• Reduces R&D costs
• Increases product quality/reliability
• Reduces time to market
• Ability to find and correct defects before your product is released (and before your customers find the defects)
• Maximizes Mean Time Between Failures
• Lowers field failures, in-warranty problems, and associated costs
• Ability to confidently increase warranty coverage

See the links below for additional information on HALT/HASS.

• Specification Sheet for Qualmark Typhoon 2.0 (PDF)
• HALT Synopsis (Word doc)
• Notebook Computer Case Study (Powerpoint)
• High Reliability Challenge of Broadband Equipment: Optimizing Hardware Reliability with HALT and HASS (PDF)
• Highly Accelerated Life Testing — Testing With a Different Purpose (PDF)
• The Calculation of Grms (Word doc)