Modeling & Maximizing Burn-in Effectiveness

System burn-in can get rid of many residual defects left from component & subsystem burn-in since incompatibility exists not only among components but also among different subsystems and at the system level. Even if we perform the system, subsystem, and component burn-in, the system reliability often does not achieve the requirement. In this case, redundancy is a good way to increase system reliability when improving component reliability is expensive. This paper proposes a nonlinear model to: • estimate the optimal burn-in times for all levels • determine the optimal amount of redundancy for each subsystem. For illustration, a bridge system configuration is considered; however, our model can be easily applied to other system configurations. Since there are few studies on system, subsystem, and component incompatibility, we assign reasonable values for the compatibility factors at each level. ©1995 IEEE