Life Testing

Life Testing is used to evaluate the long-term performance of the product during development or for production monitoring using a sampling system. The test is usually carried out under maximum rated operating conditions and may therefore take a long time (e.g. several months) to give meaningful results. Thus much defective product may be shipped before a problem is identified!

Higher stresses (beyond data sheet limits) may be used to accelerate the life test. This allows problems to be identified more quickly, and also substantially reduces the Life Test equipment capacity required. However, it is important to analyse the failures and carefully evaluate the results for relevance to actual failure mechanisms since the higher stresses may introduce additional non-typical failure modes.