How to predict the lifespan of your electronic device?

Every product has a certain lifespan. How long this period is, depends on a lot of different influences, both external and internal. How can you predict the lifespan of your product to make sure it lasts long enough? Ansys software can help you with this.

Predicting the lifetime of your product is not an easy task. It is often costly and time consuming, but also important! Compliance standards need to be met and warranty claims can be very costly. Therefore you want to make sure that the lifespan is up to your standards but also doing this as cost effective and quick as possible.

There are a lot of influences that can affect your lifespan such as fatigue, shock, vibration, thermal cycling, drops and more. As said earlier, making sure your electronic product is compliant to EMC regulations, it’s thermal reliable and that the signal & power integrity is set, will help with prolonging the lifespan of your product.

Heat failure

Failure due to heat is one of the most common problems of design failure. Normal operation of your product will result in thermal cycling that can cause cracking due to the varying thermal expansion coefficients which causes solder joint fatigue. It affects multiple parts and assemblies.

To check if your product can handle these thermal cyclings, you can perform a PTC test: Powered Temperature Cycling. These test can expose the thermal issues of your device over time. However, physical PTC testing is extremely time consuming and expensive with thousands of hours of testing. Using simulation tools offers you the option to assess all of the thermal risks with your product in a few minutes.

Ansys Sherlock

Ansys Sherlock offers you the possibility to perform Reliability Physics Analysis to understand how long a product can last under certain circumstances. It can analyse your electrical, thermal and mechanical performance. Ansys Sherlock determines the time-to-failure or cycles-to-failure for all your PCBs components using various reliability models. It can be used in different stages of the design process to make sure your product is up to standards every step of the way.

The Ansys Sherlock software can work with a lot of standard ECAD which is translated to a full model right away so that you don’t have to do this yourself. It is equipped with a rich library of components, materials and PCB laminate data to give you a quick start in your simulation without having to manually add your data.

Simulating the lifespan of your product helps you reduce warranty returns in the field, saving you time and money. It also accelerates the introduction of new technology and design changes and gives your brand a good name for being reliable, saving you time and money in the end.