Product category: Test Accessories
News Release from: QualMark | Subject: HALT/HASS test chambers
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 19 December 2006
Read between the lines of test chamber
specs
Determining which HALT or HASS chamber can best meet your reliability programme requirements takes more than a quick glance of spec sheets.
For those engineers who are not accelerated testing experts, but yet surveying the market for the best value in HALT and HASS chambers, the industry is full of bewildering and confusing "specmanship" claims A larger value of itself does not guarantee better performance in actual use, and sole reliance on the data supplied from most specification sheets is a recipe for disaster
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 2 Oct 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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The subtleties of accelerated testing chambers cannot always be easily boiled down to readily quantifiable attributes.
Instead, it takes an educated eye to see beyond the printed figures to understand the true performance factors of any given chamber.
HALT (highly accelerated life testing) and HASS (highly accelerated stress screening) have been recognised as one of the fastest and most effective new disciplines for design verification testing and production screening - allowing a broad range of industries like consumer electronics, medical, automotive, military and aerospace to bring products to market quickly with reduced design and warranty costs.
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But modern accelerated chambers come with their own set of parameters which go beyond those of traditional electro-dynamic (ED) shakers that are designed to test to a design spec.
Therefore, consider data such as "thermal ramp rates" and "vibration frequency and energy" as merely the starting points for comparing the new repetitive stress (RS) chambers used for HALT and HASS that incorporate stresses in excess of that found in the field.
Ideally, the best way to choose a chamber is to take a design under test (DUT), seed it with known failures, and have each of the manufacturers under consideration subject the product through an abbreviated HALT test.
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